My commute to work uses a four mile bus/cycle route that predominantly prohibits cars. Great you may think and for the most part it is. A wide, open, traffic-free road with the occasional bus but watch out there are zombies about….
Cars are prohibited on most of it except roads around local schools and shopping centres or zombieville as I call it. I regularly have to navigate pedestrians, mainly school kids that just walk into the road without looking or even a care in the world when they clock eyes on you. Thats if they can raise an eye from their screen on their smartphone which is common too.
The video above is from yesterday and you’ll see that the first part is me descending a hill to a junction. At the end you’ll see a mother and daughter just walk straight out into the road. I shouted “No, No, No” as I approached and they barely broke stride.
The worst place is the last part of the video where I roll through the group of school kids just walking in the road. Their school is behind me on the camera so if a bus is pulled up here letting them off, they just walk around and straight into the road again. Don’t even look. Occasionally I get frustrated and shout at them to look which sometimes makes them jump (usually the girls) but the rest just look at you blank or not at all.
One day I’m worried I’m going to ride up to an ambulance on scene scraping one from under a bus.