What gene is it that humans share with dogs that compels us to dash across a busy street just before the cars arrive?
I call the intersection where Broadway, Columbus and 64th all come together Eugenics Corner. To get across to Lincoln Center, you effectively must cross three streets, with two small islands between. Except in the middle of the night, it's almost impossible to get all the way across in a single cycle of the traffic lights, but that doesn't stop dozens of people from trying every day. Almost any time of day, you can go to that corner and watch people attempt to improve the health of the gene pool by running out into traffic.
I don't know whether people don't see the traffic coming, don't think it's coming in their direction (it is a confusing intersection), or think they can beat it. But inevitably someone steps off that second island and then has to bust a move to get to safety. My favorites in recent memory were the very well dressed, very portly couple on their way to the opera who apparently thought that their social status rendered them superior to the laws of physics. In the middle of the street, when they realized they had stumbled into the path of a predatory yellow taxi, a base flight instinct snatched the reins away from the conscious mind—sort of. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to picture these two fine corn-fed specimens hustling their asses to the safety of the opposite shore.
I wish people like that would be more considerate of those of us waiting patiently for the light to change, the ones having small heart attacks every time the jaws of Darwin miss by a fraction of an inch. It's too bad they usually make it to the other side alive. (I've only seen one person struck by a car in all my life, up at 125th Street. That's if you don't count the time I was hit myself, at the age of eight, which probably explains a lot about this pet peeve of mine.) There are often children watching this spectacle, and how can a parent teach his kids to cross the street properly when so many adults are setting such a piss-poor example?
