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by Commander Tansin A. Darcos 06/06/2018, 6:39pm PDT |
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I first learned to drive in and was licensed in California around 1977. I, of course, having walked, taken a bus or rode a bicycle everywhere was a professional pedestrian. Robert A. Heinlein, the science fiction author who had lived in Los Angeles in the 1960s, said that there are only two classes of pedestrians: the quick and the dead.
So basically, if you needed to cross a street at an intersection not protected by a traffic light, you stood at the corner and waited until there were no cars coming. Cars stopping foir a pedestrian in a marked crossing? Ha ha ha hee hee hee oh whoever heard of such a ridiculous thing. So I was used to this.
Flash forward a few years and our family decided to move from Long Beach to Texas. This will take one through Arizona, specifically Phoenix and Tucson.
One day I was parked either in a lot or on the street in Phoenix and I was going to cross a major street, very busy. So I walked up to the corner, and was watching the traffic. In the space of perhaps five seconds, something amazing happened. The cars stopped! Because I was standing at the corner and wanted to cross, cars on both sides of the street stopped so I'd be able to cross.
I was so amazed at this I realized it must be standard practice outside of California and adopted it when I was driving past a crosswalk.
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