alt Hacker News>A vehicle will materialize out of nowhere and crash into you.
God I hate these sort of responsibility shirking opinions and their peddlers.
I do this several times a day in a major US city for close to a decade now and I've never had a close call closer than the "two people trying to pass each other in the hallway" routine with a driver trying to take a right on red.
Vehicles and everything else on this rock flying through space obey the same laws of physics.
If the traffic on a road goes X miles per hour, then simply don't cross it where you don't have a sufficiently long line of sight. If crossing where the lines of sight are sufficient is not tractable due to traffic volumes or road construction then cross at a marked crossing, intersection that interrupts traffic flow or use proper body language and someone will stop for you.
Sure, you might get exceptionally unlucky and choose to cross at the exact minute some car that's a few standard deviations above the norm but you might also get hit by lightening.
> I do this several times a day in a major US city for close to a decade now and I
I, I, I
> Vehicles and everything else on this rock flying through space obey the same laws of physics.
Yes. Yes they do.
That's why some countries (e.g. Sweden) actually have this in drivers ed: how fast a vehicle travels, how long it takes for the driver to react, what the stopping distance is for a vehicle etc.
They even teach things like "parked cars are a double problem because you can have people especially kids suddenly appear from behind them".
Or things like "at night you only see this far, and judging distance to things becomes harder".
But all that, including laws of physics, is invalidated by a litany of "I, I, mine, my, me".