blood target 4: the reckoning

here’s a situation. imagine this + is a four way intersection. call it 5:45 am, friday morning, a bit rainy with some snow mixed, but nothing hazardous. one block from a major intersection, still dark out but street lights all over the place.

i’m standing on the street corner of the lower right quadrant there, waiting for the light to change so i can cross the street. there’s a car at the light opposite me, next to the upper left quadrant, waiting for the light so it can turn left, cutting across my path.

who has the right of way? i had always thought pedestrians always had it, and that if i walked out into the intersection, and i’m not exactly invisible here, i would be spotted, and the car would wait for me to pass before it moved at all, let alone slowly swing into the lane i’m walking across. but that’s exactly what did happen, and if i hadn’t been alert and sped up, and the car hadn’t been moving slowly, i’d have been hit and probably killed.

by a cop.

he didn’t have his lights on, and i guess he didn’t see me, although i have to assume it’s because he wasn’t looking since he nearly plowed right into me. dude just started up at the green and arced through my path, then stopped. i couldn’t tell if he was looking back at me feeling stupid, or waiting for me to pick a fight, or what the hell was going on.

i should have noted his license plate number or something and lodged a complaint. instead i re-learned a valuable lesson about not picking a fight with a moving vehicle.

the best part is that if it hadn’t been a cop, i’d have jaywalked across the street long before the light changed, because there wasn’t any other traffic on the street. just a single cop car, inspiring me to obey the traffic laws, and that was the one that nearly hit me.