Pedestrians Versus Automobiles

Drove downtown today to make a pickup (two keys of heroin, if you must know). Northbound on 13th, I stop at Everett. There are a couple of people coming down the stairs to the corner on my right. I look left for traffic, there isn't any, so I turn right around the corner. May have cut the people off, but I was there first, by a hair. Drive four blocks to Flanders and 10th to make my pickup. Streets North of Burnside are in alphabetical order, one street per letter. Drive down 10th to Glisan (prounounced Gleason, like Couch is pronounce Cooch) and turn left. Driving up Glisan in the left hand lane and there are a couple of cars stopped in the left hand lane. Why are they stopped? Who knows?, but Murphy says if I wait on them I will be there all day whereas if I go around them they will promptly move, so I go around. As soon as I do a couple of pedestrians walk out from in front of the stopped cars and in front of me. We are all a little startled. I step on the brakes and they hustle across the street. The guy turns and and shakes his fist and yells something. I can't hear him, the windows are up. It is the same people I cut off at the beginning of this story. I can understand him being a little ticked off. I was stopped a car length from the intersection, so it wasn't like a really close call or anything.

This is a bad intersection. The pavement has concrete cross walks, but no markings, no lights, and no warning signs. Glisan is fairly major street through downtown, it leads to the freeway and escape. We had a bicyclist killed downtown by a big truck last week, and a bus mowed down a group of pedestrians a couple of years ago, so people are understandably a little edgy.

P.S. The stopped cars weren't actually cars, they were vans or SUV's or something which prevented me from seeing the people in the crosswalk.