Look twice before you cross the street

March 17th 2007

This morning I had to go to the prefecture (courthouse) for an interview for my request of French nationality (I’ll be writing about this real soon). So I took the bus to the metro station which is just a few minutes from the courthouse. There is an underground passageway because there is no crosswalk to cross the street. But most people take their chances and cross the street anyway, because the underground passage is a lot longer. So I lined up with 5-8 other people (there’s safety in numbers right?). We waited for the lights to change so that there will be a break in the traffic. Once that happened, we started to cross the street. It’s quite big with several lanes of traffic. About half way across, a few cars started coming, ones that turned right at the light. So most of us stopped, to allow the cars to either stop and let us go or for them to go by so we could continue. I say most of us stopped because a young girl was reading something as she was walking across the street and wasn’t paying attention. Neither was the driver of a small car that was going quite fast. It all happened in less than a second, no time to react. The car sees the girl and slams on his brakes as he passes by, just missing her by 3-4 feet. Then everyone starts yelling at the driver, who speeds away as if nothing happens (actually he didn’t even come to a complete stop).

It was a very close call. A few seconds of inattention on the part of two people almost caused a fatal accident. And from what I hear, it happens a lot. With 11 million people and thousands of cars, it’s quite a problem. Running red lights, the lack of lanes on the roads (yes most of the roads in Paris do not have lanes), speeding drivers, the big city stress, motorcycles that drive on the wrong side of the road and/or in between lanes, etc. all adds up to a dangerous situation for pedestrians.

Here is a chart of the number of accidents in Paris (this doesn’t include the suburbs):

Fatal Pedestrian Accidents Paris

Here is the breakdown:

pieton accidents

1,944 pedestrian accidents in 2005. That’s 4.5 per pedestrian accidents a day! 58% were due to pedestrians crossing the street outside of a crosswalk. Next time I think I’ll use that underground passage.

For more information, see Paris Accident Statistics (in French).

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