A couple of years ago I was hit by a car making a left turn at an intersection. Yes, I looked abd had waited for the walk sign and still waited a bit. Fortunately I wasn’t seriously hurt although the bill for the emergency room was 25k. I had a friend who wasn’t so lucky trying to cross. Very sad, he had three little kids.
Slightly off topic - have people noticed the increase in the number of hit and run accidents? Just about every day I hear about at least one.
I know it is unfortunate, but as a pedestrian, you have to assume every darn car is going to hit you.
I sympathize with drivers on this as well. I have to drive through a town with all these crosswalks, and it is busy-there are cars going in every direction, people walking and going in every direction, there are cars parked on the side, bicycles going up and down the street, and when the light is just so, it is nerve wracking for me to drive through it every day. I hate it.
Near there, I hit a cyclist some years ago, and suffered some PTSD from that for 6 months to a year where my heart would pound there. (The cyclist was "splitting lanes", that is, driving on the centerline painted on the road that divides the two lanes of opposing traffic) I was pulling between the line of stopped cars to take a left hand turn during rush hour, and when I pulled through to pull out, the guy ran into my vehicle.
It was awful. Apparently, in some places, that "lane splitting is legal, but it isn't in my state, which is probably why I wasn't charged.
I thought it was an insanely risky and irresponsible thing to do, in one of the worst intersections in my county if not my state, at rush hour. I had no idea what "lane splitting" even was.
For months, every time I wasn't thinking of something else, or if I closed my eyes, I could see, unbidden and unwanted, that second and a half of continuous, high resolution, full color clip in my brain in super slow motion of the guy and his bike cartwheeling together through the air, his bare calves, the biking shoes, his helmeted head. Oddly, the only feature on the pale face visible was the mouth, a black hole, open. No eyes, nose, eybrows, nothing. Just the open black mouth.
It went away after about six months, and I don't see it anymore. But since then, I have an entirely different perspective on PTSD. It is one thing to know about it and hear it, and quite another to experience it. My heart breaks for people like soldiers, police, or firefighters who may have been severely injured (or in the case of a soldier or policeman, had to inflict violence on another human which left an indelible mark on their brain, sometimes for the rest of their lives) My heart breaks for those people, it must be absolutely awful.
I had to drive that road every morning, I began leaving home an hour early every morning to avoid traffic, but even coming up on it empty of cars was disturbing. But if I went later, and the traffic was heavy, my heart would pound, and I felt completly out of control, and didn't trust my eyes or reflexes to pull out into the heavy traffic. So I just made sure (and still do) to not be at that intersection when it was busy.
Some time after, perhaps a year later after the guy on the bike hit my car, I was watching a television series "Better Call Saul" late one night, totally relaxed, and in the movie, the main character driving a car hit a man on a skateboard.
When the collision occurred in the movie I went from completely relaxed to a hammering heart, fumbling with the television remote to turn the television off, shouting "F*** F*** F*** F***!!!" until I could remove even the afterimage from the television. It was awful. I thought I was completely over it, but...apparently not. The view through the windshield, the suddenness of the collision...it was exactly like the collision I had, view, sound, etc.
Even now, when I looked up this clip to see if it was online anywhere, I felt a growing sense of dread, and when it did happen...I shouted out a curse and it made me jump.