A Quick Rant

I usually try to keep the ranting to a minimum.  Because being angry and annoyed at stuff starts to annoy everyone else after a while, you know?

But lately, it seems like everywhere I look, this one small thing is driving me crazy: people's refusal to use the sidewalks!  I don't know if this is just a Virginia thing, or if it's a spreading epidemic, but I keep seeing it.  Kendra and I often end up walking to Bentley's school behind a couple high schoolers who insist on walking in the middle of the road so that cars have to swerve to avoid them.  I think that's was pretty obnoxious, but I usually chalk it up to their age and try not to care.  But then the other day, I was driving on a long, straight stretch of road in a nice neighborhood, and had to avoid a woman walking her dog in the bicycle lane!  Why wasn't she using the sidewalk right next to it, which would have put a little more distance between herself (and her dog) and my speeding car?  In the same day, I went around a corner and had to avoid an older couple who was also walking in the road (and going even further into my driving space to walk around a parked car!), and there was a perfectly good sidewalk right there!  And every time I go to the temple, the last part of the drive through Rock Creek Park is an exercise in trying to not mow down all the cyclists riding side-by-side on a windy, narrow, shady road (all of which makes it pretty hard to even see them) that has a perfectly good paved bicycle trail right next to it!

And that's when I finally get annoyed and begin complaining.

Maybe it's because where I grew up, there aren't any sidewalks.  Bicyclers and pedestrians have less than a foot of grass between the white line on the road and a deep muddy ditch, but we usually try to stick to that foot of space when we see or hear a car coming.  So when you live in a neighborhood with lovely, smooth, wide paved sidewalks, why wouldn't you want to use them???