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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

I teach my kids rule number one as a pedestrian: You never have the right of way. Legally you might, and it's important to go when it's your turn after you've made active eye contact, but realistically the car will always win that fight.

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Waiting for eye contact is also becoming more difficult as more people are blacking out their front windows, effectively obscuring everything in the car even through the windshield.

Last I heard this is illegal -- yet here in SoCal it's pretty much fallen into the "unenforced" bin, along with unmuffled exhausts.

And here in Ohio driving with your high beams on all the time has become normal and I'm seeing more people with rear facing light bars too. All, I assume, breaking laws that appear to no longer be enforced.

Two of the times I’ve come closest to getting hit were in crosswalks when the driver appeared to look at me, the car slowed down, seeming to yield and then hit the gas.

In the second case the driver stopped after, and told me she’d slowed because she was blinded by glare and then decided to just keep driving.

I don’t even know how you teach that one to a kid — never cross the street?

"Yield to gross tonnage" is how I've always put it.

That's a good one. See also: "'He had his turn signal on' won't look good on your tombstone."

Learned this one from an old biker: The Right of Weight will always win.

Seriously. That's how I've always described it. I drive a large vehicle. You will lose. Get out of the way. Use common sense and move. I like that. I'm going to put that on my car: "Yield To Gross Tonnage". Good shit.

It's not actually supposed to be a call to break the law...

It's a pretty good bumper sticker, though. It's like Pax Propter Vim. "Yield to Gross Tonnage".

Cede Magni Ponderis

Cars take the role of megafauna we have been trained over millennia to respect.

if only we could hunt

And the majority of them have been hunted to near extinction, in some cases not even because they're particularly dangerous, just because it's fun to shoot things. One person indeed stands no chance against such a beast, but that's why it's always a group of several people that takes the job on, and they come armed, and with a plan, and they don't stop until it's dead.

People are very good at this, possibly too good, which I assume is why there are laws against doing this to drivers.

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