I empathize, and it's not always great. In response to "how can people put up with this?", I'm not sure what we can do. Meaning, I'm not sure there's an action I could take to improve things.

Also, not saying it isn't bad, and not saying we shouldn't do something (anything) to make things better, but you probably walked down one of the worst stretches (depending on which part of market street you went down).