I had taught the woman that she can cross as soon as she hears any surge of traffic on the parallel street (other than right-turning traffic). So as soon as she heard traffic on the far lanes of the parallel street surge forward, she moved her white cane and started to cross. I was pleased that she was doing so well, and happened to look up and see that the pedestrian signal said "DON'T WALK." I vividly remember exactly what went through my mind. Within a fraction of a second, I thought, "Oh, that's odd! But blind people cannot see the pedestrian signal, so they can't be expected to obey it, right? So it's okay for them to ignore it, and cross the traditional way that we teach them." OH MY GOODNESS! The drivers apparently disagreed - it was summer and the windows were down, and some were leaning out and yelling and making ferocious faces, others were honking as if to say "HEY! It's MY turn, take your cane and get off the street, lady!" We made it across the street and talked about how rude those drivers were, but I remember thinking, "YIKES! I wonder if their rudeness and aggression had something to do with the fact that the pedestrian signal said, 'DON'T WALK'? Maybe we better figure out how the heck blind people can know what the darned pedestrian signal says!" It wasn't until several years later that some O&M instructors figured it out (as explained in the section on traffic patterns). I learned about it when I happened to be substituting for one of those instructors, and I asked her teenage student why she wasn't crossing when she heard the surge of parallel traffic. "Oh, Mrs. Sauerburger," she replied with some dismay that I would even suggest such a thing, "Mrs. Frieswick told me to wait until I hear the sound of the parallel traffic in the nearest lanes." |
Later I explained the LPI to my client who wanted to cross there. He was never able to recognize when the pedestrian signal changed to WALK until the near-lane-parallel traffic had started surging forward. By then, it was too late to start his crossing because of the aggressive right-turning drivers. They had always been aggressive there (that's probably why the LPI was installed!) but they seemed to become even more so once the LPI was installed, perhaps because when my client didn't start crossing with the WALK signal, the drivers assumed that he wasn't planning to cross. |
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