Red Light! Green Light!

(Today’s rant sponsored by Orbitz Grapefruit Mint Gum)

As a New Yorker, I have become a walker. I lived in my last apartment for over a year before I realized that there was a bus that went from my corner directly to the Park Sloop Food Coop. Instead I had been walking for half an hour with all my communist groceries on my back. Good honest people’s work, granted, but come on!

In NYC, I felt that walking was the superior means of transportation. I never owned a car, although I cavorted with people who had motorized transportation of one kind of another. But cars and taxis and buses get stuck in traffic, too. The subway is great and has its own wonders, some of them named Moe, but it also has huge disadvantages (rats, urine smells, preachers). So walking was often my first choice. I felt most independent when striding down the street, crossing at will and smirking at stalled traffic.

I flaunted my pedestrian priority. I said it in my head as I walked around (‘I have the right of way, motherfucker! Don’t even think about turning.’), I slapped car hoods, stared down taxi drivers to force them to wait and, when appropriate, said snarky things to bike riders who pedalled on the sidewalk(My friend Thomas tried to say snarky things to bike riders too, but it came out wrong – ‘This is a SIDEwalk, not a RIDEwalk.’).

But the pedestrian is not king here, not even close. Bicycles rule the sidewalk. Half of every sidewalk (lengthwise, he he) is allocated to bike riders, which is indicated by red brick. If, as you are walking along, you look down and see red brick – achtung! – you are walking on the bike path and are liable to get run over. No more snarky comments for me. Now the bike riders make snarky comments (‘Do you mind if I pass?’).

Do you remember the game ‘Red Light, Green Light’? As a kid, I would sometimes play this (or some combination of Red Light, Light and Simon Says … Simon Says walk like a chicken….Green Light!!!) when I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I wonder if kids here play it constantly, in order to hone their waiting at intersection skills. Germans, as a rule, do NOT cross against the light (I’ve never been certain if crossing against the light constituted jaywalking or if jaywalking was crossing in the middle of a block. Anyone?). You might be standing at an intersection, and there are no cars coming. It’s a Sunday, it’s raining, the shops are closed, no one is around. Not a SOUL. And still the Germans will wait for the green signal. I’m not just talking about older, more traditional folks, I’m talking about young and old, hip and less hip.

When I first got here, I thought that I would try to observe this custom (just like keeping both arms on the table at dinner and eating with the fork in the left hand, smashing mashed potatoes on to the back of the fork). I would get to an intersection with a red signal and wait. I would look around anxiously to make sure that everyone else was really going to wait like this. I started feeling like a dork, standing there, waiting for green. Perhaps I would rummage through my bag, pretending to look for something. Anything to distract myself from this painful wait. After a couple of days, I decided that I could no longer deny this rebellious urge to cross against the light. I am now regularly venturing out into intersections, leaving the Germans on the sidewalk.