Crosswalks

In some places in this country pedestrians can walk safely across the street on a crosswalk. Those places are not New York. Here, you take your life in your teeth, and you'd better have brushed and flossed.

The other day I was walking downtown for my weekly head shrinking session (my head has grown unwieldy and heavy over the years from too much crankiness) when I stopped at 37th Street and Park Avenue, waiting to cross. When the light changed there was a car stopped in the crosswalk. But this is not an uncommon occurrence here. Cabs edge through the crosswalks, hoping that all the traffic ahead of them will miraculously clear and they'll be able to get through without blocking traffic. Only, it never happens that way and as a result traffic is always gridlocked.

Why gridlock? Three reasons. 1) People are stupid. 2) People don't trust each other. 3) People are stupid. Or as my Grandpa Schlomo liked to say, "Oy, what a bunch of fuckheads." It's very simple. When you approach the crosswalk in your gas-guzzling Hummer, stop, wait until you can safely make it across the intersection without blocking traffic and only then proceed. It's logical and if everyone obeyed this rule there would be no gridlock (people in Carmel, California obey this law, although the folks there are all brainwashed zombies so perhaps that doesn't count). But stupid people don't get this simple rule: they edge out, kicking off a chain of heart wrecking events: the next guy thinks he should edge out too, his blood pressure increases, he pumps the horn, his IQ goes down 3 points to 64, the light changes, the pedestrians squeeze between the cars, they give the finger to the driver in the crosswalk, he gets out ready to fight, traffic is blocked, the driver's mother half way away across the country has a vision of the Hindenberg exploding and she collapses in a heap, blood.

The rest of us just don't trust each other to obey the rules: if one person breaks the rule and you don't, then you could get stuck waiting to drive through an intersection for several decades. So it doesn't pay to trust each other (even though it really does).

I think several law changes could alleviate this problem. First, make it legal to walk over cars blocking crosswalks. When the car is in the crosswalk and pedestrians have the right of way, then the car simply becomes part of the crosswalk. Second, issue $10,000 tickets to anyone blocking a crosswalk or traffic. That for first offenders. For second offenders, the death penalty. That'll probably stop gridlock, as it will thin out the population of stupid people rather quickly. (For more on the death penalty, go to my 2/1/06 post on escalators).