Over the last few months following my accident, I’ve been walking about a lot more. More recently my girlfriend arrived in the UK from Canada and she’s had an interesting experience ‘learning’ how to cross the road again.
The first observation of my girlfriend is that car drivers seem to act as if they absolutely own the roads and pedestrians must ‘seek permission’ to be in the roadway. She’s shocked that pedestrians have to wait to cross the road – at an unsignalled junction for example. In Canada, cars will typically yield to a pedestrian waiting to cross at a junction. We had to wait for more than 5 minutes as a convoy of cars left Meadowbank Stadium.
She also perceived some motorists using their cars to intimidate pedestrians – often at zebra crossings. Often cars will not slow down as the approach crossing either to hurry the pedestrian along or to stop them half way across so the driver need not stop. I thought this was interesting as I’ve often felt quite unsafe crossing at the marked crossing in Hollywood Park.
I welcomed these candid comments and it got me thinking about my time abroad and more generally. I’ve always thought of North America being a country designed around the car – wide avenues, out of town shopping and huge highways cutting through cities. In some area of Montreal, the suburbs don’t even have pavements for pedestrians.
In contrast, Edinburgh seems to be designed around much smaller vehicles (people, bicycles, trikes and horses and carts). With that in mind, how have we ended up with the attitudes we have?!
I still don’t fully understand the militant mentality some drivers possess. I’ve been taking a taxi to work most mornings for the last two months and I’ve witnessed a whole range of bad driving and close calls with cyclists. Sometimes I’ve ended up saying to my driver, “I’m only going to work, [driving like that] it’s not worth it!”.
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