🚀 go-pugleaf

tryanc@athena.mit.edu (Timothy Ryan Cleary) wrote:
>
>I live in Cambridge, and bicycle about 6 days a week,...  Drivers are
>much more predictable than the pedestrians, who often just listen
>for cars, and jump out into the street in front of me after it's too
>late to so anything but narrowly miss them.  Or they walk past the
>parked cars and into the bike lane along Mass. Ave without looking
>first, and wait in the middle of the bike lane for a break in the
>auto traffic.  Cars and taxis are also parked and double parked in the
>bike lane, making things even more difficult.
>
>Is this how biking is in other cities?  Pedestrians with a deathwish?
>I have heard that you can actually get a ticket for jaywalking in some
>places in California (I still can't imagine it, though).
>
I lived in Cambridge in the late 1960's before there were bike lanes.  
Because of pedestrian congestion, I usually just walked around the 
Harvard campus.  I did thousands of miles of bike riding, but always rode 
toward more distant points.  Seeing the thread on the pedestrian-bike 
tensions in Manhattan, and remembering my own experience in Cambridge, 
plus last September at the Rhine riverfront in Cologne, I just doubt that 
there's much happiness to be had as a bike rider in such areas, unless 
you're willing to be calm about low speeds and many unexpected stops.

Regarding ticketing pedestrians for jaywalking or walking against the 
lights, I received a couple such tickets when I first came to Milwaukee 
(WI) in 1961, but shortly after that, the police largely abandoned 
writing those tickets.