indi.ca

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.