Blog from the USA I: I've Got the Power (to stop traffic)

I am certain now that this was not a dream. This was an actual incident that happened to me yesterday at the Miami International Airport. Listen close.

I left the airport terminal to walk to the little park outside of Terminal E. To get there I needed to cross the four lanes of chaos where cars, vans and taxis leave off departing passengers. As I put my foot in the white-striped crosswalk a miracle happened. The cars stopped! Not one, all of them! They stopped for no other reason than to let me cross. I am not making this up.

Perhaps you have to live in Bolivia to understand the miracle of this. In Cochabamba, my friends, cars do not stop for pedestrians. Never. Ever. Okay, once around 2002 it happened to me but I think one exception in eight years does not change the rule. In fact, the actual rule seems to be speed up and aim at pedestrians, as if it were a point system of some kind. I even got knocked down once by a white Toyota (90% of the cars in Cochabamba are white Toyotas, as if Toyota had some kind of point system).

Now, there may be pathological reasons that I am so breath taken by the fact that the cars in the Miami Airport stopped for me. I confess, I may have a car-stopping obsession that I can trace back to when I was seven years old living in Whittier, California and the powers that be (God, for all I knew then) installed brand-spanking new traffic signals at the corner where I lived, complete with little buttons that made the light change and set off a pedestrian go signal. I discovered, to my great delight, that a certain size stick would smash the button into permanently-pressed mode and, without lifting a finger and from the deniability of my front yard, I could make four lanes of drivers screech to a maddening halt every 85 seconds. It was glorious, really.

I guess I am a pedestrian at heart. It has been 21 years since I got my first driver's license and in those 21 years I have only owned a car for 8. Not bad for someone who lived in California most all of that time. A Californian without a car is like a Bolivian politician without his own political party, a rare breed.

Here in Washington, DC this morning, while out for a run, I saw something even more amazing in pedestrian power. At the traffic lights they have a little timer that tells pedestrians exactly how long they have before the light changes and you become fair game for any car that wants to make road kill out of you. That is courteous. In Cochabamba there are no timers involved. If you step off the curb they assume you are a volunteer.

So there you have it. The US is great nation because, unlike so many in the world, you have 45 seconds to cross the street and in that moment, pedestrians are king. More powerful than a Hummer, more than a limousine with diplomatic plates. All this and bagels with cream cheese. Just some of the cultural advantages in the world's lone superpower.