Peds will step out. Children are especially likely to but absolutely anyone has the capacity to just walk or even run out into the road without looking, sometimes from behind cover. I've collided with peds a two or three times as they emerged from behind stationary vehicles and run straight into me or into my path.
I'm very impressed with this clip from a motoring article by none other than Jeremy Clarkson. He wasn't on a bike, of course, but when it really mattered he was acting in a most unpetrolheaded way that we could all learn from.
"After seeing a body for the first time I have genuinely slowed down a bit. Coming home from London the other night I pulled out to overtake when I was 98% certain the road ahead was clear. But then an image of that poor man’s twisted head popped into my head and I abandoned the manoeuvre before it had really begun.
Yesterday, while driving into my local town, a mother was walking down the pavement with a little girl of three or four. Normally I’d have slowed and covered the brake in case the toddler leapt into the road, but after my South African experience, I damn nearly stopped.
And I can’t tell you how that felt when, moments later, the little girl did indeed run into the road. That dead biker, then, 6,000 miles away in Johannesburg, had unwittingly saved the life of a little girl in England.
You may think this all a bit too convenient. A bit too editorial. But it happened. I really was thinking of the dead man, and braking when the girl ran out. If I’d been doing 30 I’d have hit her. But I was doing 10, maybe less. So I didn’t. "