A
friend from D.C. was down here last weekend for a wedding and we
managed to squeeze in a lunch with her, her husband, my boyfriend and
myself before they were whisked away into the wedding dimension, where
everything is flowers and hairspray and standing around waiting for
something interesting to happen. My friend is a fellow Texan but she
married a man from around Seattle, so naturally we were entertaining
him over lunch with tales about the famous disregard Texans demonstrate
for the niceties of personal safety, tales with punch lines like,
"Here, hold my beer while I shoot the fire."
Just to make his
life a little harder, my friend laughed and turned to her husband and
asked him to tell us about the crosswalks in the suburban Washington
neighborhood his parents now live in. Apparently, each crosswalk has a
stack of orange flags on each corner. The legal protocol for crossing
the street is to hit the Walk button, wait for the signal to turn, grab
two flags and wave them in front of you as you cross the street, for
maximum visibility. How dramatically you wave them is completely up to
you, as is the choice to throw in a little soft shoe as you make your
way across the street.
The conclusions you draw from this story
are completely up to you. The conclusion I drew was that we should have
orange flags at the crosswalks here in Austin, but only at the big
crosswalk where the mall at UT intersects with the middle of the Drag,
where in the middle of the day when things are busiest on campus each
Walk signal dumps hundreds of students into the crosswalk. It would
just make things a little rosier if each of those hundreds of students
was required to wave orange flags as they crossed. Sort of like a
mini-parade every 2 minutes or so. They could make the flags burnt
orange, if they like, to keep it in the school spirit.
Mouse Words blog was source
