3 ms·
I'm in my 40s, I've never had a car, and the only thing that makes me feel somewhat safe when I cross in front of a vehicle is making eye contact with the drive
by david-gpu 4y ago
I'm in my 40s, I've never had a car, and the only thing that makes me feel somewhat safe when I cross in front of a vehicle is making eye contact with the driver, which is sometimes difficult with the prevalence of tinted windows.
In my experience, drivers look for other cars, not for pedestrians. We are not a danger to them, so they subconsciously filter us out, as we are not a threat to them.
To make things worse, in North America traffic rules are particularly hostile to pedestrians, allowing things such as right turns on red. Which is to say, as a pedestrian I am naturally not allowed to cross the street when the light is red for me, but for some unclear reason, if I were to be driving a 2-ton vehicle then somehow it is no longer considered dangerous for me to ignore the same red light. Bonkers.
- kqr 4y agoThe difficulty with eye contact is that it's easy to interpret as being there when the other person really just looks through you. Very common to hear about accidents when one person was confident they had eye contact and then the other just had no idea they were there. In fact, eye contact works so badly for me that I prefer looking at the front tyres – their direction and angular acceleration tells me a lot more about where the vehicle is about to be. Pointing, however, is very explicit and rarely happens by accident.
- mitchdoogle 4y agoPeople don't look for peds because they aren't trained to, and for the most part, peds aren't that common. Only if you're in a dense urban center, would I say that they're common (in the US)