Crossing the Street

If you're old enough to be reading this blog you're old enough (surely) to think that you're competent at crossing streets, right? Well, not so fast! Mechanics are a bit different here (kind of like looking the opposite direction first when you're in England). Here the trick you MUST learn is that many of the larger streets have separate traffic signals for each direction of traffic (even if it's only one lane in each direction) and they change at different intervals (check out the photo). So, if you want to live, when you've halfway across the street you need to pause and check out the traffic signal for that part of the street!

OK, that's easy enough to learn. But it turns out that there's a cultural component to this as well which goes like this: though laws here have penalties much like in the US there's a different attitude towards them. Here, if a car encounters a red light but there's no traffic coming, the car is likely to just keep going. So, in a certain sense, in terms of common usage, traffic signals are often treated as 'optional' or 'advisory'. What this translates into in practice is this - if you want to cross the street and you have the green light, not so fast! From a social context, the French (and others) see no reason to stop if there's no traffic!. Here's what I do - I wait for the traffic to stop, I step off the curb (announcing my intention to cross), stare in the direction of the driver and then, and only then, do I cross! Of course, when there are crowds of pedestrians, this works in reverse. Often, even if the cars have the green light, the pedestrians just cross, en masse. Just a little bit of anarchy to keep life interesting!