I Brake for Animals - and Zombies

There are zombies walking the streets of Sydney. You can spot them easily, walking in the middle of the street, staring vacantly, unaware that cars are having to brake to avoid hitting them. Oh yes, and they are always holding a cellphone to their ear.

Three times this week alone I have had to brake because someone had walked into the street while having a conversation on the phone. They were totally unaware that I had had to stop the car. I am not even sure if the zombies were aware they were in the street.

OK. I am not Woody Harrelson. I know they're not really zombies. Nope. What they are can be described in one word - stupid. If you want four more words, you can add selfish, rude, ignorant, and so-far-up-their-own-butt-they-can-see-their-tonsils. (Hyphens make that one word.)

There is an absolute epidemic of stupidity on Sydney roads right now. It is a very rare day when either a pedestrian or driver doesn't do something stupid. And it's often both. And more often than not, it happens more than once.

Just this afternoon, in a drive of about 8 minutes from the store back to our home the following happened: I had to brake for one of the cellphone zombies in the road (in the middle of the block) and two blocks later, while making a turn, I had to brake for a woman who decided to pull out of the street where I was turning even though I had the right of way. Oh, and she quickly discovered that there was nowhere for her to go because there was a line of cars waiting at a stoplight. So she ended up blocking the other side of the street for oncoming cars, as well. And yes, she gave me a dirty look as if my desire to turn into that street had caused her foot to hit the accelerator pedal.

A block later we pulled into the small parking lot of our dry cleaner, only to contend with someone who decided it would be OK to park diagonally, thus preventing other cars from getting to the parking spots. Leaving there, I turned a corner and had to quickly swerve to avoid a double-parked car. A few blocks further on we saw an SUV decide it needed to do a U-turn at an intersection and it nearly ran over a couple of pedestrians. It's not even worth mentioning that a block from the house a car in front of us slammed on its brakes and turned right without a signal.

What's really bad about all this is that it is so typical that I have come to assume it will happen. And because this was on a Saturday, we didn't have to deal with all the tradesmen, couriers and others who use vehicles in their work. You can safely predict that they will slam on their brakes, double- and even triple-park, reverse, u-turn and basically do whatever they want. I am sure their attitude is, "I'm at work. Time is money, and I don't have time for all this road-rules crap."

Now I have been in some cities like Saigon, Shanghai and Rome, where you could not pay me enough to get behind the wheel because the drivers there are basically insane and operating on the principle that rules are for suckers.

And when we lived in Boston, I found out later that the boys had a standing bet on how many seconds would go by when I was driving before I cursed at someone. But those drivers were just hyper aggressive. They were not - at least in most instances - like Sydney drivers. Which is to say, stupid.

I am fairly sure this stupidity is just the product of plain old-fashioned selfishness where the dolts do whatever it is they feel like doing because, well, I guess because they just don't care about anything or anyone else. But now that I've written it, I realize it can be summed up in one sentence: It's soooo Sydney.