I was walking down Market street to work the other morning when I witnessed two near-accidents.
The first happened as I waited at the intersection where Fremont street crosses Market and becomes Front street. Usually the jaywalkers are impeded by a steady stream of one-way traffic barreling up Fremont street, all eager to not get caught by the Market street light (so yellow means accelerate), but this morning there was a sizeable lull. Enough that a small band of jaywalkers started across the street.
I didn’t jaywalk, as it’s become my form of rebellion. I do not join the cavalier majority who ignore the red light and the halting hand.
As I waited for the green, a latecomer blithely stepped into the street. Wearing earbuds, and a good half dozen or more paces behind the first wave. I looked down Fremont, and an SUV was barreling at us, hell-bent on beating the light.
“Look out,” I said. Jolted back into the here and now, Johnny-walk-lately looked to his left, saw the oncoming SUV and stepped back up on the curb. There was a pause, then he looked over and calmly said, “thank you.”
“Your welcome.”
The light turned and I continued down Market, musing on earbuds, cell phones, and all of our techno-improvements, many of which have simply collapsed time into faster and faster increments so we all want everything instantly.
I got to Kearney and Third Street, which is an even worse intersection for northbound one-way traffic. I’m not sure why it’s worse, but I have a theory that it has a higher volume of traffic off the freeway, so the jostling drivers all have a keener, more competitive edge on as they approach Market. These people not only accelerate on the yellow, they tailgate each other through on the red. It’s not even close. For years I’ve dreamt of a traffic enforcement officer lingering at that intersection just to rack in the big bucks. What the heck, San Francisco is in straits as dire as everywhere else.
So I get to Market and Kearney with the cavalcade pouring by, and this time it’s a short, swarthy maniac running into traffic. He was carrying a large box of produce, it could have been avocadoes, yet he had clearly left his brain behind. He may have seen that the oncoming light was yellow, I don’t know, but it was clearly still red for us, and he ran out into traffic, running behind a truck and right into the path of a sedan which had to slam on the brakes.
Even then, he barely acknowledged the driver as he bobbled the produce box, waving instead at an oncoming Muni bus. A trio of vehicles had to stop for him, one in the lane he had just passed through, but probably stopping out of astonishment at his death wish with avocadoes. It would have made for macabre guacamole.
He didn’t want to miss his bus, which was at one of the center islands on Market street. He made the bus, too.
I had a better post in mind for this, one which I wrote in my head as I continued my walk, but seem to have left behind that morning. I don’t draw any great conclusions from all this haste and carelessness, other than, perhaps, a reiteration of what our parents and teachers told us all so long ago: look both ways when you cross the street. The world is not like it was a hundred years ago, with all those calm jaywalkers we saw on Market street.
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I know, I’ve been missing in these parts (??). Part of it is that the wife and I went up to the foothills of the Sierras last week. So I’ve got some pictures to share. soon, I hope.
OmbudsBen 
“I didn’t jaywalk, as it’s become my form of rebellion.”
I love this. I’m the same way.
And this: “…macabre guacamole.” Someone should invent a recipe and name it macabre guacamole. Or is that too gruesome? Probably so, but I like it anyway. It would be a good Halloween dish.
When we lived near the university (Kent State), I used to have problems with jaywalkers with cell phones and iPods. Girls talking on phones walking out into the street without looking, guys with ear buds running out into the street without looking. Scared the heck out of me the first time or two. The only good thing about it is that it occurred in the same spots so I learned to look out for the not-so-aware.
I used to work on the border of Tenderloin and Union Square, and we drove through the Tenderloin to get to work. My husband said that people were like cats, always running in front of cars. I think maybe more like squirrels. Or idiots.
My mom had a saying that has always made me very careful of crossing streets. She didn’t even mean it for these idiots, but just for ‘it doesn’t matter who has the right of way, a car is bigger than you’. They saying was, “right, right, dead right”. Yeah, be careful.
As an Alameda couple, what do you think about the failure of the bond to support the schools? On the one hand, it was a BIG increase in money for people to pay. On the other, what’s to happen to the community if the schools close?
Robin, the macabre guac should have tasty tomato chunks, I think. Not the storebought kind (tastes like cardboard), but good tomatoes. Also maybe onion. (Beyond that, chili powder and cumin. Also, if stored in the fridge, I level it as much as possible and put a very light layer of lemon juice on it, as it preserves freshness and is delicious when mixed in, upon next serving.)
J, bearing in mind we have no children, the school vote was very frustrating. Even though it required 2/3rds of the vote, it almost passed.
Our property values in Alameda have held up well. Very roughly speaking, any multi-BR home is worth $250,000 per BR, give or take. Some less, but lots more, especially with so many beautiful, well-preserved Victorians. So here we all are in our expensive piles of lumber, many of us unwittingly profiting from a huge unanticipated real estate updraft that rendered our homes several times more valuable than the price paid for them.
But we aren’t going to share the wealth. No way! We’ve gone all Scrooge.
So schools will close; several elementary, jr. highs, and our two high schools collapsed into one for the whole city. We adults, who profited so handsomely from the sacrifices of our parents and grandparents, will deny the next generation of the benefits we were given post-WW2.
More and more I’m convinced that mid-20th century, from FDR’s New Deal to LBJ, was the high water mark for American civilization.
They had far less than we did, yet willingly paid the taxes to build a huge national educational system that was the envy of much of the world. And our greed gradually dismantles it.
I never jaywalk, either. I always wait for ‘the little green man’ 🙂 Just as well, since I invariably have my iPod headphones in and would probably have long since been a macabre guacamole casualty…
Oooh, pics from the Sierras??!!!! *anticipation*