Why vintage?

[tonyb]

^^^^^^^
There will come a day that none of us will live to see when people will just shake their heads at how people of our time had pedestrians and bicyclists sharing the same pavement as automobiles and large trucks. There have been some safety improvements in recent years, but unless and until anti-collision technologies (not just after-the-fact stuff, such as airbags and crumple zones and all that) get a helluva lot better, I just pray for the people on bicycles.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to jump out of the way of cars whose drivers failed to notice me crossing a street. Too frequently people who can’t jump out of the way, people with various disabilities, suffer injuries, some of them fatal.

 

[belfastboy]

^^^^^^^
There will come a day that none of us will live to see when people will just shake their heads at how people of our time had pedestrians and bicyclists sharing the same pavement as automobiles and large trucks. There have been some safety improvements in recent years, but unless and until anti-collision technologies (not just after-the-fact stuff, such as airbags and crumple zones and all that) get a helluva lot better, I just pray for the people on bicycles.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to jump out of the way of cars whose drivers failed to notice me crossing a street. Too frequently people who can’t jump out of the way, people with various disabilities, suffer injuries, some of them fatal.

As a pedestrian I walk the streets as a paranoid....reciting the mantra....."Just because you are a paranoid, does not make you wrong."

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^^^
Red traffic signals and white lines on pavement have proven incapable of physically stopping a motor vehicle. But I can envision technologies that would. I hesitate to predict when (or even if) that might happen.

 

[tonyb]

“He Had the Right of Way” would make one helluva epitaph.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"He was right -- dead right -- as he drove along. But he's just as dead as if he were wrong."

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^
I was looking into the authorship (Too much time on his hands? Me?) and came upon this …

 

[tonyb]

As a pedestrian I walk the streets as a paranoid....reciting the mantra....."Just because you are a paranoid, does not make you wrong."

This afternoon’s news feed reports a pedestrian fatality a couple miles from my house.

Shocking but not surprising, considering the speeding and red-light running I routinely witness at that intersection.

 

[tonyb]

This morning brought the sad news of the passing of a 98-year-old woman I have known for more than half a century. She died at home, as was her wish, of pancreatic cancer, diagnosed just a month ago.

She lived independently in that home right up until that terminal diagnosis. She was widowed 40-some years ago.

The old gal’s passing was a central topic of conversation with another nonagenarian this morning. Maybe three minutes after that phone call that elderly person rang me back and asked if I had heard of that other old woman’s death. Oh boy.

It’s not that I ain’t slipping a bit myself. I regret not more thoroughly picking the brains of those a generation ahead of me, while they were still alive and still had most of their marbles. But then, a fairly recent attempt at putting together the pieces of events going back 60-plus years revealed unsavory details of which I had been blissfully unaware.

I’d like to live as though the truth was nothing to fear. I’d like us all to live that way. I’d also like a pony and an early Jaguar E-Type and recognition I will never see and honestly don’t deserve.