Death Wishes

At the moment, for me, it seems to be something of a common occurence for me to have near misses, or relatively near misses, when i'm driving around Charleston. Now, you may think that this is me admitting that i'm a bad driver - when, seriously, i'm actually very safe when you consider a lot of Charleston drivers (on second thoughts, best not consider cause you'll just shake you head and wonder how they managed to get a licence in the first place). Au contraire. It seems that no matter where and when i go, i seem to attract an inordinately large number of crazy people in the vicinity of me. It seems that a lot of people in Charleston either have too much faith in the drivers here, or have a serious death wish about them. - for this is mainly restricted to pedestrians and not other cars.

You may remember a while back, me talking in a post about how dangerous and vulnerable i felt as a pedestrian, given the amount of idiots on mobile phones here. Well, it seems that the Charleston pedestrian has evolved into something completely different. Thus, yesterday on my return from the supermarket, I was trundling along at 20mph (10mph below the speed limit) when a man came running out of a side street and straight across the road in front of me without so much as a glance. I had barely gotten over this surprise, when someone following him came out doing exactly the same thing. These two men then proceeded to run down the middle of a one-way street, going THE WRONG WAY! And this is just one example of many - the lady with the pushchair who decided to stop in the middle of the road so she could pull her cellphone out of her bag and answer it, the group of builders who were sauntering across a busy road in rush hour, never mind the large amount of traffic jam they were causing as well as the fact that drivers in the other lane were coming off the James Island connector at about 60mph. All in all, it seems, there are some seriously crazy pedestrians out there as well. I just count myself lucky that i haven't hit one!