How to Cross the Road Safely

Have you ever caught the advertisements on the radio lately on how to cross a road safely? As I listened to the advices, I wondered to myself, how applicable and "safe" are they? There have been several (I think) but there are two which I felt that I needed to comment on.

The first one talked about how suicidal it was to cross half a road first, stand in the middle of the 2-way road whilst waiting for the traffic to clear, before crossing to the other side. Yeah.. they mentioned that it was suicidal to do that. But wait a minute. Have they tried crossing Jalan P. Ramlee during a working day? There is no way you can make it across to the other side of the road in one "dash". Now, that would either be really suicidal or you can opt to stand there and wait until the cows came home just to cross to the other side for lunch. Sure, there is a set of traffic lights somewhere but this also takes blinking long to change for the pedestrians. It seems that this set of traffic lights has been designed to favor drivers on the road. With only 1 hour to eat lunch, do some banking (now that banks are not opened Saturdays) and a mite of shopping, no choice but to attempt to cross the road without the help of the (no help at all) set of traffic lights.

This is followed on by the next advertisement where a kid tells her dad (who apparently has poor vision) to stop looking left and right and left...but just take it easy and cross at the zebra-crossings. Buahaha.. now that is suicidal. Firstly.. are we really sure that our Malaysian drivers (most anyway) knows what is a zebra crossing, what it means and more importantly, whilst they are busy talking on their handphones or yakking with their passengers did see those stripes painted on the road. Then we also have plenty of selectively "vision-impaired" drivers who at times miss any lines drawn on our roads, be it a zebra-crossing, yellow boxes, bold yellow lines which denotes no parking and also yeah.. even double solid lines for strictly no overtaking. Then there are those (I am sure that there are plenty around) who chooses to rev their engines and to pick up speed just because they know that you intend to cross the road... zebra or no zebra....now that really sounds suicidal to me.

See, if one knew the mentality of our Malaysia Boleh drivers, there is really no safe way to cross our Malaysian roads. It is really and truly cross at your own risk. Too bad our KL infrastructure is so unlike Singapore... where one need never surface above ground level at Orchard Road... I think that is so neat :).

So, what is my safe way to crossing the roads? Me.... i follow a bunch of people crossing the road and I try to stand in the middle of the bunch....more buffer for me hahaha (kiasee)

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