San Francisco is a very walkable city. We pride ourselves in our cyclists/pedestrian-friendly ways. So much so that we have utter disdain for cars and their drivers. We often abuse the "yield for pedestrian" laws with reckless ambivalence.
Between the shuffling homeless dudes pushing carts full of everything (and I mean everything) and the oblivious tourists bopping to their iPods, jaywalking and sloooowww street crossings are a common occurrence. If you're a driver it's a recipe for a huge ol' plate of Road Rage.
As a transplant from VA, where i used to mash on the motorway and was full of more road rage than Michael Douglas in "Falling Down", I was happy to relinquish my car upon moving here. My commutes now consists of walking, riding buses, BART and MUNI trains. It's a relief in all senses of the word. I get a little exercise, the world moves a little slower and I'm less stressed...usually.
But the way of the pedestrian is not all puppy dogs and ice cream. I still get pissed from time to time. My gripes range from "people don't know how to walk" to "the sidewalks are too narrow".
Now let's go back to that first quote: What do you mean "People don't know how to walk"? People in SF (especially tourists) have no concept of personal space. They walk the streets aimlessly looking around as if they're waiting for the sky to collapse on their heads. In doing so, they completely ignore the fact that I'm walking behind them, motivated with a place to be and a time to be there.
A reoccuring example of this is on the escalators where people don't understand that escalators are like freeways: the right is the slow lane, the left is the passing lane. Simple shit right? Not here apparently. In London or NYC they'd verbally castrate stragglers on the left who prevent you from making it to your train. But we're nice here. It's SF. We deal out polite, "excuse me's" instead.
The escalators can be the pitts but the true vexation lies in my neighborhood streets. I live in Glen Park which neighbors Noe Valley to the south and thus has a similar demographic of residents: Young couples with babies. Yes, my neighborhood is mostly prams and mom's circumventing the 'hood doing whatever it is they do.
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What's beef? Beef is when you're trying to get past a mom with a kid in a stroller and a kid holding her hand; hogging the sidewalk worse than a Hummer in an Eastern European back alley. I can't even count the number of times I've been walked off a sidewalk or even worse, almost mowed down by a mom's stroller.
What gets me even more heated is the fact that the parents and kids have this attitude like we owe them the sidewalk. Like we should have no qualms about climbing a fucking tree so they can get past. Why should I roll out the red carpet for them to pass on by?
This predicament often puts me in a sticky situation: Do i take the moral high road--step aside or do i just put my shoulder down like Earl Campbell and plow through some families? Obviously I take the high road and do my best matador impersonation. But if i could, man...bad, dark things would transpire.
Have you ever seen anyone punt an infant and then throw a stroller at a pregnant lady?
And these parents, these fucking parents are the worst because they don't even acknowledge your efforts to dodge them. They're so into little Trevor and Jackson that they don't even say "hi" or better yet "excuse me". They just roll past you like you were a cobweb in an attic.
I haven't figured it out just yet but I'm gonna take my sidewalk back. Yeah...know dat.
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