One of the main things I see is that pedestrians don't seem to have the right of way. The fact that pedestrians have right of way was stressed, to my memory, in driver's ed. Even if a pedestrian is illegally jay-walking, you slow down and wait for them. If they're crossing at a crosswalk, you definitely wait for them.
However, here this seems not to be the case. For example, the very first morning I was here I nearly saw a man get run over. He was crossing the road at a designated crossing point. A car was turning right onto that road. Both kept going, and finally the car stopped, honking and clearly upset, probably hardly a foot from the man. I think in the US, the car wouldn't have even started turning, because there were people crossing.
But I see this repeatedly. If a pedestrian hasn't quite made it across an intersection while a light is green, cars will start going anyway. Hopefully the pedestrian runs out of the way in time. While jay-walking seems common, it seems very unclear as to whether a car would actually stop before running into you.
Marked intersections for pedestrians to cross at on major streets don't seem to be an obstacle for cars, either. The cars will be stopped, because they have a red light, but they'll be stopped in the middle of where you're supposed to walk. I find myself walking around stopped cars, hoping I make it across before my light turns red, because I can't trust that they won't start up immediately given a green light.
However, cars do seem to be very good at stopping at the pedestrian cross walks with yellow light up balls. Not everyone, of course, but this seems to be the safest place to cross - if available.
The top of one of the pedestrian cross walk signifiers, which someone had humorously drawn a smiley face on. |
While writing this post, I Googled whether pedestrians have the right of way here. Seemingly, they do, at least at designated crosswalks. It also specifies that they do when crossing a road and the car is turning into the road. However, that exact situation almost got a man (and probably others) run over, so it seems that what's written may not be what's practiced.
This article mentions that while pedestrians do have the right of way, in car-pedestrian collisions, the pedestrian is considered at fault, because they were the ones "heedless of on-coming traffic." I believe that in the US, pedestrians are essentially never at fault. So perhaps that's part of the difference in practice.
I'm not exactly sure what's going on concerning cars vs. pedestrians, but I simply hope to survive this trip, and not be run over.
Way back when I lived in Chile, I noticed the ways of the road a lot. I have never seen a people so crazy about when and where to cross the street as there. It seemed so much that cross walks were merely a suggestion, and not a rule. People darted out into traffic all the time, heedless of the traffic. I was shocked that more people don't get killed. That said the cars were even more crazy. Traffic lanes were mere suggestion, almost no one actually followed them as to staying in a lane and were frequently found driving with the lane marker in the middle of the car. Surprisingly, there are or at least were few traffic accidents too...
ReplyDelete