Do you thank the driver who stops for you at a zebra crossing? With a smile, an awkward wave or a more “street” gesture, like an ironic peace-out?
London is a hot candidate for world capital of public rudeness, but in this alone we excel. Driving in the sticks, I've observed, pedestrians generally just lumber across, enjoying their right of way. In London, the gratitude is genuine, the courtesy unexpected: “Thank you,” they are saying, “for not killing me!” Mostly I say thanks too. Hey, it costs nothing, people.
Except when I see a driver approach who is clearly reluctant to stop, who needs reminding of the Highway Code scripture “you MUST give way when a pedestrian has moved on to a crossing”. An imperative in capital letters: so, yes, it's compulsory even if you are late for Pilates. Then I step out and make the sucker halt and saunter across without a by-your-leave. On one such occasion a woman wound down her window to yell: “Why should anyone stop if people like you don't say thank you?” Er, because it's the law. And I'm not feeling well disposed to someone who almost squished me.
According to a report by the AA this week, Britain has removed 1,000 zebra crossings in recent years. You can see the Government's logic in phasing them out in favour of pelican crossings. Yes, of course, the vital matter of road safety should be overseen by some bleeping, centrally monitored control panel, through the medium of computerised buttons and sequenced lights, bolstered by a penalty camera. It can't be entrusted to human beings.
In one sense this evaluation rings true. The consensus on what constitutes public good manners has broken down to the extent that Transport for London is now running a multimillion-pound campaign, employing the Oscar-nominated film director Mike Figgis, just to remind us not to eat stinking burgers on the Tube and to give up our bus seats for old folk.
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“A little thought from each of us. A big difference for everyone,” goes the Pollyanna-ish slogan.
I suppose we should be grateful that, instead of threatening more penalities, TfL is calling upon our better nature. Whereas the Government seems to live under the delusion that if just one more pleasure is prohibited, another set of draconian rules introduced, 1,000 more speed cameras installed, a CCTV mounted on every corner, human beings will at last fall into line.
Likewise zebra crossings, although enshrined in law, are predicated upon our better nature. A driver is legally obligated “to look out for pedestrians waiting to cross and be ready to slow down”, ie, to anticipate another, more vulnerable person's needs and put them before his own. This in our individualistic, go-faster times, is what idiot marketing types call “a big ask”.
Crossing at a zebra you have to catch the driver's eye and make an instant character reading about whether this person is likely to grind you into the stripes. And you may be wrong. As when I was crossing the Kings Road, Chelsea, after a dreary school-shoe mission with my elder son. Surely, this approaching silver Porsche was going to stop. We were, after all, in the Royal Borough.
But no, the Porsche zoomed across my path nearly taking off my toes. So I retaliated like any middle-class matron in possession of the moral high ground and a Peter Jones carrier bag: I walloped the back of his passing car. And so the Porsche screeched to a halt and some well-dressed Sloaney lad - possibly an offspring of the Conway family - how-dared me for bashing his motor. And when I how-dared him back for breaking the law, he pointed down the congested thoroughfare and said: “Can't you see the traffic is completely backed up?”
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You might think that the culling of zebras, making road safety less dependent upon whether posh gits are late for lunch at San Lorenzo, would save lives. But instead we now have the third-worst pedestrian safety record in Europe, just behind Spain and Italy. And in those two countries zebras are meaningless scribbles to mark where you might have a sporting chance of survival or to keep the bloodstained carnage in one easy-to-clean spot.
But this new reliance upon the little green man is foolhardy. Our children, Pavlov's pedestrians, rush across the moment they see him, not checking that the traffic has actually stopped. Which it often hasn't.
Because now there are so many sets of lights, needless frustration has made amber gamblers of us all. Barely used side junctions where once drivers used their real-life brains to pick a gap in traffic are now governed by elaborate sequences. There can be no more soulless, Edward Hopperesque moment than waiting late at night on a completely deserted intersection for a machine's permission to go home.
Drivers should embrace zebras. You only have to stop when a pedestrian is present. Better than waiting at an empty crossing where the bloke who pressed the button has long since legged it. The little exchange of courtesies they usually entail can lighten a journey. Ah, bless that mother and baby safely on their way because you alone cared.
And, while our towns are now besmirched with vile signage, clashing coloured lanes and ugly railings to imprison pedestrians, zebra crossing have a quaint charm. Belisha beacons, with their 1950s Toytown, Tufty Club associations, rank with pillar boxes and red phone booths as rare examples of elegant native street furniture.
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Moreover, zebra crossings represent the British libertarian spirit, an upholding of ancient rights of way, the freedom to jaywalk, the freedom even not to have a word in our native argot for jaywalk or a statute in our legal system prohibiting it. A jay means in American dialect a “rube”, a country bumpkin unaccustomed to city ways. Yet whenever I'm in New York or Berlin or any other place that has brainwashed its citizens into crossing only at designated spots for fear of committing an infraction - in Singapore you can land a jail sentence - I always think, as I weave through the traffic, that they are the docile, unworldly doofuses who probably still use blunt-ended scissors.
Zebra crossings also reflect the British attitude towards the car that is still healthily ambiguous. Of course, when on foot we should have right of way, freedom to cross at the very moment we demand it. Steam must give way to sail. And people rather than big governments and their little green men should decide when the moment is safe.