Rogue Walkers Loose in Bellingham

On a Friday at 5:20 p.m., a bicyclist obeyed the trail riding rules along the South Bellingham Bay trail. The bicyclist wore a helmet and safety vest to increase visibility, and was riding at a reasonable speed. He used a bell and called out when passing walkers, and thanked them when they moved over, which seldom happened.

As he proceeded south along the trail, a walker/hiker sprang (literally) without warning onto the trail in front of the bicyclist from the woods along the trail. The bicyclist swerved and avoided a collision with the walker. The rogue walker, who had ear buds in her ears and presumably was listening to music, seemed oblivious to her contribution to the near collision.

On the following Saturday, around 1:30 p.m., the bicyclist in the above account, now a vehicle driver, was driving north on North Garden Street below WWU, driving below the speed limit and obeying all traffic laws, when a group of walkers stepped out from behind a large parked SUV into the path of the narrator’s vehicle. The pedestrians were not at a marked crosswalk or even an unmarked crosswalk at an intersection. Our narrator was forced to brake hard to avoid hitting the group of rogue pedestrians, and could only shake his head, wondering how the walkers had survived in life so far.

A few disclaimers are due. Some of my best friends are walkers and are sane and polite, but it only requires a small fraction of scofflaws to create large problems and give a bad name to a good activity. This is increasingly the case in Bellingham, where pedestrians regularly walk into traffic without looking and seemingly without awareness of the risk to themselves or to the near accidents and angst they cause. To verify this claim, one need only spend 10 minutes or so watching people cross in the middle of the street in front of The Bagelry on Railroad Avenue or the Bellingham Public Library.

Contrary to claims by a previous author in The Watch, however, this narrator believes the problem is not about the age-old problem of humans and the Machine, but rather the simple fact that humans in general are getting stupider and more self-centered. This is true for pedestrians, bicyclists, and operators of motor vehicles. Increasingly, one must walk, ride, and drive more defensively than ever.

I. M. Rider