Busting Colombo Jaywalkers
Jaywalking elephants being taken away in chains.
What’s jaywalking in Sri Lanka? Crossing the road. I always try to find zebra crossings so I can stare down cars, but some places there are no zebras. In Dehiwela for example, there’s one crossing marked a ‘Disabled Crossing’ with sounds and stuff. Which is nice, except it’s the only ‘Disabled Crossing’ in miles. Like, a disabled person would have to walk from Colpetty to Dehiwela to cross the street. Which is to say, the policy of ‘strictly enforcing pedestrian laws‘ is a good idea impotized in a sea of bad policy.
Colombo policy is designed around cars, everything from the one-way system (piping in traffic from the suburbs) to the sidewalks, or lack thereof. More generally, public transport is a mess and seems to get zero thought, perhaps because Ministers are rolling in convoys with traffic herded to the side. A zebra crossing is one thing, on many roads there is no navigable sidewalk at all, simply no place for pedestrians. To get to my parents house I have to walk down this blind curve on the narrow road itself. It is the wackness.
This is not to say that pedestrian behavior is not mad, but it’s survival of the fittest out there. The police are just culling the weakest of the herd. In this case they arrested 274 jaywalkers in the first three hours. Well, of course. It’s really not fair to ticket peeps 1000 for something they don’t know.
So to conclude policing the streets good, pedestrian law good, but please clean up some of the stuff oppressing the pedestrian plebs before oppressing us directly.
Not to quote Ice Cube, but the Sri Lankan police are hardly beloved. A 
I just gave a talk at the University Of Sri Jayawardenapura along with Reeza Zarook of Anything.lk and Rohan Jayaweera of Google. These are my notes: Devin Jayasundara asked me for a subject for this talk and I told him Internet property. But I talked to my fiancé Shru and she had a better idea. Startups aren’t about creating property at all, not really. They’re about creating territory, about creating land.
I haven’t been blogging much, I know. It’s partly because we’ve been doing a lot of work on YAMU, especially shipping 1.0.1 of the Android app today. It’s on the 
I met an old-timer who said they used to drop acid and sleep atop Sigiriya, but the place has taken on a more commercial and quasi-spiritual role now. It was built by a king as a sort of retreat and used as a monastery. Now it’s a prime tourist and cultural destination. Hence it’s a bit odd to see a Japanese beer commercial shot up there. There’s a bunch of people eating, um, deep fried cream filled coconuts and then drinking some bracing beer. I hear the whole thing cost Rs. 25,000 (I’m presuming they used stock images).
This is just another avenue for the cops to make money.
Sri Lankan Police are a bunch of spineless gutless sissies. They can’t arrest a criminal with over 10 arrest warrents (e.g Julampitiye amare) but want to arrest innocent pedestrians. What a useless sh1thole this is.
Also I can remember Sudharman Radaliyagoda went to a Police station in Piliyandala area to see his friend in lockup WHILE there was an open warrent issued againt him. The sisssy police cannot arrest a person who has come their very own doorstep. Ridiculous.
I like your comment about a disabled person having to “walk from Colpetty to Dehiwala to cross the street”.