powla said:
why oh why, do pedestrians step out into the road without looking? This has happened to me so many times, today I nearly collided with someone who couldn't be bothered to wait for the green man or to look..and they looked at ME like I was the idiot?! Have to say that it shook me up slightly and feel so annoyed.
Grrr
Some suggestions:
1. Pedestrians tend to be looking for cars, which are a lot easier to see and hear than bicycles. A bicycle is easily lost in the peripheral vision when scanning for a gap in the traffic. In an urban environment there is often a lot of information for the brain to process and to cope with this, the brain filters out information that it can't make sense of initially (this is why SMIDSYS happen).
2. If it is raining, hoods/umbrellas obscure the view of the road enough that bicycles can easily be missed.
3. Pedestrians aren't looking out for bicycles because there are so few of them compared to the number of cars (thus their senses are optimised for motor vehicle awareness).
4. Some people live in a dream and have no spatial awareness whatsoever. These people wander about anywhere with no regard for other people at all. As far as they are concerned no-one else exists. These are typically the same people who stop in doorways to answer mobiles, park supermarket trolleys in a way as to obsruct as much of the aisle as possible and stand there in front of the shelves for ages right in the very spot where you need to get something.
5. Walking about can be very frustrating in some places as urban areas are often suboptimal for pedestrians which can lead to the pedestrian having to assert themselves in a type of negotiation with the traffic in order to get anywhere fast.
