I'm walking around Port Alberni. I'm walking an awful lot around Port Alberni. I'm one of the only people who is walking around Port Alberni. The only other people who seem to be on the streets without cars are dog walkers, high school students, and the street people. Everybody else is driving.
I may be a bit of a problem for the drivers. I walk down the streets. I try not to walk right down the middle of the street, but I do walk on the streets. For one thing, Port Alberni is not overly liberally supplied with street lights. And, of course, an awful lot of my walking is done at 7:00 a.m., and sometimes even earlier. Or, these days, as the sun goes down around 4:00 p.m., I may occasionally be walking to evening events, and even walking home from them. So, I'm walking in the dark.
And, one of the other factors about Port Alberni is, the sidewalks are in absolutely terrible shape. An awful lot of the sidewalks seem to have been laid down many decades ago. A lot of the pavement has broken, buckled, and has ridges sticking up that can be dangerous, particularly in the dark, and particularly to an Old Person who is subject to falls anyways. So, I walk on the road. The road pavement is in far better shape than the sidewalks.
I try to stick close to the sides of the road. But, of course, in the morning or the evening when I do most of my walking, there isn't an awful lot of traffic on the road. (I try not to walk down Johnson. The sidewalks tend to be in better shape than in much of the rest of the town. Although there is this four block stretch where the sidewalk disappears completely ...) So, most of the time I'm not impeding anybody even if I am walking right down the middle of the road.
The residents of Port Alberni do not know what heavy traffic is. They complain about rush hour. At rush hour, in Port Alberni, you can count, fairly easily, the number of cars at Gertrude and Johnson. And that's the only intersection you have to worry about. And, if you have the slightest idea of the actual layout of the roads around here, there is actually no need to go through the intersection at Gertrude and Johnson at rush hour. You have a number of options. And none of them are blocked with any traffic at all. I am reminded of the fellow who phoned in for the traffic report, on the CBC morning show (which accepted traffic reports from communities around the province, but of course mostly concentrated on the traffic jams in Vancouver). He called in to say that, in his town, there was heavy traffic, because there were *two* cars at the stop sign.
One of the aspects that contributes to the beauty of the town of Port Alberni, is the incredibly wide streets. The width of the streets does make it easier to walk on the roads, even when there is traffic, and not impede anybody. I was going to say not worry anybody, but that's not true. I'm still learning the rules of the road here in Port Alberni, but there are significant differences to cities that actually have traffic. For example, in Vancouver, cars will stop for pedestrians, but only if the pedestrians are actually on their side of the road. If someone is starting to walk across the road, and is still on the side for oncoming traffic, you, as a driver, proceed through the intersection. Not so here in Port Alberni. Sometimes it seems that even if I am within six feet of an intersection, and have not, as far as I can tell, indicated my intent to cross the road, cars will stop at the intersection to allow me to cross. If I intended to turn the corner and keep on walking down the sidewalk in a different direction, I almost feel *required* to cross the street instead. This morning, I was approaching an intersection, from a good fifteen feet away, against a red light in my direction of travel. A car was coming down the street towards me, to the intersection, indicating that he was going to make a right turn, which would have crossed the crosswalk in front of me. But the light was against me, and he could, quite legitimately, have turned right after he came to a stop. He didn't. He just sat there at the intersection. I crossed against the red light, and then, after I had exited the intersection, he made his right turn. Like I said, I'm still learning the rules of the road around here, and they definitely are different.
Yes, lots of cars will stop for you, here in Port Alberni. But not everybody. I've had a number of incidents, crossing intersections, where cars blow through, without indicating that they've even seen me. It wasn't until I was driving my car, the other day, (I had to go and get a large item from the store), that I realized what was probably happening. They probably *don't* see me. Port Alberni drivers are not used to heavy traffic. They're not used to much in the way of traffic at all. They have not grown up with the mental, situational, and attentional demands that heavy traffic requires of you. When you are used to dealing with big city traffic, not just your head is on a swivel, but your attention is constantly on a swivel. You have to expect the unexpected. You have to keep on checking, absolutely everything, in every direction. Eventually you learn this. You see things out of the corner of your eye, and react, almost without knowing why you are reacting, or what you are reacting to. If you are not doing this all the time, your brain will use those processing circuits for other things. I strongly suspect that, possibly in less than a year, my ability to drive in the heavy traffic of Vancouver will be greatly diminished. Another reason to reduce the number of trips that I make to the mainland.
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