Right of way

A pedestrian was killed in Montclair in a hit and run incident a few months ago.

Today I was crossing at a College Avenue crosswalk and a car zipped in front of me — clearly didn’t see me until too late, and beeped to let me know, but it was aggravating. (Especially the beep, since my first reaction was, of course, who the — are you beeping at?)

I’m not saying that Oakland is dreadful for pedestrians, but I definitely notice less attention from drivers than in San Francisco, so I’ve been trying to figure out why.

Here’s my theory. In SF, there’s a stop sign at nearly every corner, and there’s often somebody crossing there. So you get in the habit of looking for pedestrians. Oakland is much more of a driving town, and there aren’t so many places (like College) where people are crossing on crosswalks that aren’t at signals. So people just stop thinking about pedestrians?