Why you risk your life when crossing at a pedestrian crossing

Italians love gambling, so much so that they engage in it frequently, every day, when they put on pedestrian shoes and dare to tackle the roulette wheel at a crosswalk. If you win, you cross the street and are safe; if you lose, you end up in the hospital or the cemetery and enter the scrapbook of Wasted Lives. Every year, approximately 450 Italians lose their lives because they lose their street bets, and none of them imagined that the safest place for a pedestrian could automatically become the most dangerous.

When someone dies in such a ridiculous manner, there's barely enough room in the newspapers for a short article, and the behavior of uncivilized drivers (and potentially aspiring criminals) is almost never analyzed by any of the many polling firms that fill our minds with information about electoral trends and consumer preferences. All we have left is field experience, to try to provide some answers to the uniquely Italian tendency to kill pedestrians while they cross the street.

The most common excuse from those who hit cars and tend to blame others (another very popular attitude...) is that the crosswalks are difficult to see, poorly lit, or sometimes placed too close to curves. These explanations certainly have some merit, but they don't detract from the egocentric image of the typical driver in Italian cities, who considers himself, by right, "the master of the road." He drives as he pleases. throws garbage out the windowHe honks his horn if the driver in front of him doesn't speed away when the light turns green. And he hits pedestrians at the crosswalk.

Add to the most common causes excessive speed in urban areas, including cars (and motorcycles and scooters), and the picture of the causes of pedestrian massacres is complete. A very interesting confirmation of this new barbarity comes from field research conducted by the monthly magazine Four wheelsIn Rome, only 10 percent of drivers stop when they see a pedestrian intending to cross the street, and 70 percent of drivers specialize in "dribble" past the poor gamblers who think they're citizens of a civilized metropolis. They forget that Rome is a capital, first and foremost, of corruption and a lack of civic sense, two trends that are growing in parallel. And in any case, things aren't much better in the rest of Italy: in Milan, 20 percent of drivers respect pedestrians crossing at the crosswalk; in Bologna, the figure is as high as 30 percent. And the first to understand the current situation are the pedestrians themselves: 90 percent of them, while accepting the risk, make their intentions known when they cross the street at the crosswalk. They raise an arm, wave, and, if they're elderly, raise their stick. Be careful, though: even this gesture of extreme and visible self-defense may not be enough. In Milan, poor Franco BertolottiAn 87-year-old man waved his cane before crossing a downtown street, but was struck at a pedestrian crossing by a vehicle whose driver then fled. He was rescued in critical condition and died shortly afterward in the hospital.

Pedestrian crossings have thus become the urban microcosm of a new incivility, which tends to consider others as ghosts. Invisible and to be ignored. And as with any microcosm, a series of small and large misdeeds take place around the crosswalks, all of which fall within the sphere of an increasingly less reassuring community life. The slow speed in the city, with the 30 kilometer limit then, should be the norm, invoked by all and in the interest of all, and instead it has become a measure of endless debate, including the incursions of the TAR which in Emilia Romagna thought it a good idea to open a dispute with the mayor of Bologna precisely on the 30-kilometer limit introduced in the Emilian capital.

 Returning to poor lighting, it's absolutely true that in many places, the crosswalks lack even a minimum level of illumination (which in other cases is completely wasted in urban areas) and are not highly visible. But this is part of the neglected and ignored maintenance of municipal administrations eager for events and contracts, not for the normal, daily care of the common good known as the city. And poor lighting, in any case, doesn't justify the blind spot of a motorist ready to eliminate anyone who disturbs him simply because they cross in the right, protected spot, as required by the Highway Code.