By Buster McNutt
Let’s see. Things that don’t go together: oil and water, Cleveland sports teams and championship trophies, calf’s liver and anything else in the known universe, and of course, automobiles and pedestrians — they simply don’t play well together. It is not a level playing field. Pedestrians almost never win. There was the case of William “Haystacks” Calhoun versus the Yugo back in the ’80s, and more recently New Jersey governor Chris “Cinnamon Buns” Christie versus the 2013 Smart Fortwo “Passion Cabrio” convertible, which reportedly was being driven by an incoming freshman at Donald Trump University, who may or may not have been texting The Donald with his idea to build a wall between the Unites States and Hillary Clinton, and to make hubby Bill pay for it.
There are certain species of animals that always seem to find themselves on the wrong side of the road — chickens, possums, armadillos (possums on a half shell), squirrels, little old ladies looking to hit on Boy Scouts, and increasingly, pedestrians.
I suppose we can’t stop pedestrians from getting from one side of the road to the other, but that doesn’t mean they need to walk/run/saunter across multiple lanes of vehicle-infested blacktop. I’m thinking the transporter beam is not coming online anytime soon, which is probably a good thing, since it would pretty much destroy the transportation/road building/drive-through burger doodle industries, and there is still the slim chance that not everything would be reassembled in exactly the right order on the destination end, and you could end up arriving with one rear-facing foot, or the head of a fly, or maybe no longer knowing which bathroom you are supposed to be using (which I’d think would be particularly annoying if you also had the head of a fly).
So how to get to the other side without actually crossing the road? Why not cross over the road? Obviously we can’t build millions of overhead walkways. A far more simple and cost-effective method would be to put a six-foot step ladder on each side with a zip line between them —people pay big bucks to zip line at parks and resorts and such, so this would be an easy sell! Granted there is the issue of being in the middle of zip lining across Broadway, a foot or so above an endless wave of Toyotas, when you spot the tractor trailer headed your way. In the highway safety innovation business we call this an “Oops Event.” We’re still working on that, and the combination zip line/slingshot has shown definite potential, although safely “sticking the landing” has proven problematic.
And there will always be non-zip friendly pedestrians to deal with, ranging from the elderly, people in wheelchairs or with service dogs. No exceptions would be made for people who are simply out walking their pet dogs. News flash: Fido and Fifi aren’t all that concerned on which side of the road they get their business done. So for the truly zip-line-challenged we will have crosswalks, with a human “crossing guard” at each location. I’m thinking we can recruit the crossing guards from schools initially, but then we can probably get government “retraining” grants to hire unemployed people, which we are making more of everyday — apparently businesses aren’t exactly opening their doors to public education graduates whose primary skill is filling in bubbles with number two pencils.
Actually, the problem isn’t so much the pedestrian hitting the vehicle, but in bouncing off and hitting another vehicle or the road, where the major “ouchies” occur. Requiring pedestrians to wear airbags might help, but they would probably Amazon Prime (free shipping!) them from Takata, and, well, stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
Or, we could take a more high-tech approach. I read recently that Google has received a patent for an adhesive coating for a car hood. This coating is covered by a thin layer of GMO-modified eggshell stuff, and when the pedestrian hits the hood, this thin layer would shatter, exposing the adhesive, and the pedestrian would simply stick to the hood of the car. The adhesive would dissolve in no more than a couple minutes or so, giving the driver time to drive the car to a more appropriate landing spot, like a grassy area or a fountain or maybe the nearest catching pond for the sling-shotted zip-liners, where they could be released. If this just happened to be an Uber-driven vehicle, the driver could conceivably charge the somewhat mangled pedestrian for the ride. Who says pedestrian safety can’t be a win-win proposition?
But these are just short term solutions – in the end we need to end the practice of pedestrianism altogether, simply for their own good. Well, that and because so many of them are generally annoying to the rest of us. Not as annoying as spandex-wearing bikers, but annoying nevertheless. Pedestrianism is not protected in the Constitution, and on holidays we don’t gather round, grill hamburgers, and sing songs about the great American pedestrians of the past.
A little over 100 years ago we allowed riders on horses to share the roads with cars and trucks. Now you can only do that if you are a mounted policeman or a rodeo queen or something similar. It’s just not done. No more sharing the road with riders on horses, which are also called — wait for it — equestrians, which not coincidently is the only word that rhymes with pedestrians. So what is the message here? Equestrian, pedestrian, potato, patatoe …..
Let’s just call the whole thing off! •
