Comment 108768

By AnjoMan (registered) | Posted February 05, 2015 at 16:22:11 in reply to Comment 108761

Wouldn't obeying the rules and acting safely within the framework of provided infrastructure in order to preserve your well-being present as a better example of "what makes sense?"

No. How is my well-being served by having to walk 10 minutes to travel 40 feet? It makes me angry and resentful that I have to waste all that time doing something that makes no sense for me so that someone in a car can travel the same distance in 5 seconds. Is it good for me to be angry and resentful about an obviously stupid and unaffordable design which is actually costing me other good things that I might enjoy if our city could afford them? I don't think so. Does it make sense for me to wait on a broken sensor at a traffic light until a car comes along and triggers it, when I can see that its safe for me to cross despite what the red light says? I don't think it does.

The 'rules' and 'provided infrastructure are broken, and pedestrians don't necessarily gain anything out of following them. The infrastructure is designed to frustrate those who don't use cars in order to provide a disproportionate benefit to people who are operating cars. The rules are not actually designed to keep me safe, but to keep people driving cars safe, and to keep cars moving as quickly and efficiently as possible.

And to top it all off, even if I do follow the rules I could still pay the price for someone else's failure to observe the rules of the road, while they see very little consequence. If I die on the road, the papers will call it an 'accident', even if it was caused by someone else breaking the rules. People will pity me, but they will question only whether I was partially to blame, and not whether system of roads made my death inevitable.

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