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>>>Imagine you're walking down the sidewalk, minding your own business. Suddenly another pedestrian approaches from behind and blasts an air horn right in your ear. How would you feel? Even if the other pedestrian meant the air horn to be helpful ("hey, I just wanted to let you know I was passing"), most people would find it startling, aggressive, and completely unnecessary.<<<

Yes, I know exactly how this feels as, several times daily, when walking local hiker/biker trails, cyclists do this to me with their bike-bells or in shouting "passing on the left" without slowing down and expecting me to leap as far to the right as possible. In most cases, I don’t think they mean any aggressive harm and they truly believe they are being courteous. But to the pedestrian, it is startling, aggressive, and completely unnecessary. This is not to justify what happens to cyclists at the hands of motorists, for the behavior of motorists towards cyclists in this regard is truly unconscionable. I just find it ironic that the author chose to use one pedestrian overcoming another with an air-horn as a notional example of how a pedestrian might feel, instead of the obvious real-life experiences of the area’s pedestrians at the mercy of cyclists who, otherwise, are complaining about motorists doing the same to them.

by roberto on Jun 7, 2012 12:29 pm • link • report