Yesterday I was sitting at a red, waiting for my green arrow to turn left. This is a T intersection, so I can only go left or right. There's a police officer just left of the T writing up a ticket for another driver. My light turns green, I sit for there for an extra moment and take a casual look to my right and here comes a pick up truck. He sails right through his red light, staring at the police scene, a cigarette hanging out the side of his mouth. Unfortunately the police officer has his back to the road so he didn't see what happened.
Later in the day I'm riding my bike. I have to cross a 4-lane road. There's a crosswalk button pedestrians can hit and it sets off some flashing lights to tell drivers in both directions to stop for pedestrians. I wait until there's a break in the traffic, hit the button, wait a couple seconds for the flashing lights, then proceed to cross. I get to center where there's a median separating traffic and I see this big, older, Malibu type car flying toward the intersection. Again the little angel on my left shoulder tells me to stop and wait a moment. The driver is a little old lady who can barely see over her dash board. She goes full boar passed me ignoring the light. I'm quite sure she never even saw me, so intent on the road straight ahead of her.
During that same bike ride, there are two other roads I had to cross. One had a traffic light. I waited for my white hand and am crossing when a lady in an SUV, texting on her cellphone down on her lap, finally comes to a stop halfway through the intersection. Do you think she looked apologetic? Nope. She never even saw me and went right back to texting. I'm afraid I didn't act very lady-like in the moment and displayed some sign language.
The second road I crossed was a two-lane residential road with a crosswalk type set up for pedestrians. A biker a bit in front of me crossed with one car stopped. In a random act of kindness, that driver remained stopped and waited for me even though I was a number of seconds behind. Just before I was about to cross, a car from the other direction was approaching. Now anybody paying attention would see that the car in the other direction was stopped. My angel once again tells me to wait a moment longer before crossing. Sure enough the other car isn't slowing down and is going to go through the crosswalk. At the last moment the driver sees the other car stopped, then looks my way and sees me and slams the breaks on ending up stopped right in the middle of the crosswalk. I cross like a lady, but in my head I'm talking like a sailor.