i left glasgow today with inge and riddell in a rental car headed for lug radio live 2007. i fell asleep to rain, woke up to more rain, ate some nasty road food picked up in some little road side service mini-mall and hacked on plasma a bit (more per-source configuration stuff). car rides are good for all of the above.
we dropped riddell off in a girl-friend-will-pick-me-up appropriate place and then promptly got lost looking for our hotel. getting lost is something i excel at, and today i was in fine form.
we were already late getting to wolverhampton due to car rental company charades in glasgow and by the time we made it to the york hotel the people who run the little place were already firmly in bed. we moved down the road a couple blocks to the connaught best western and here we are checking our email and writing blogs and what not. hooray for free wifi.
in my last blog entry someone asked what i found confusing about the traffic lights in glasgow. well, what i found confusing was that they would sometimes be red all the way around the intersection and everyone could walk, other times they'd be green with the flow of foot traffic and you couldn't walk or vice versa or other odd arrangements. it all seemed a bit random, odd and at times very poorly thought out from a street flow perspective. but perhaps i simply had not gotten the rhythm of foot traffic in the city and menagerie of lights directing it.
i did also notice a lot of fist fights on the streets at night. this is apparently a bit of a glasgow thing. i did some research one night into the causes of it by asking random members of the gaswegian populace to explain this phenomenon to me. i have, after all, seen my share of late night drunken town centers and street fights but never such a rate of the latter in confluence with the former. it's like arguing-then-punching is an acceptable evening hobby. no one could really explain it beyond the insightful and succinct, "well, we get drunk. and then we want to fight." fair enough.
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6 comments:
When I was in Glasgow, many moons ago, I notice the preponderance of young men with scars on their faces (from fighting with broken beer bottles it was explained to me).
When I asked about the fighting, the young woman with us explained that the combination of chronic unemployment and a low female/male ratio led to a lot of drinking and fights.
That was then; there might be some other explanation now.
-- Orv -
You obviously don't read enough Terry Pratchet :-)
The way the pedestrians move at the lights is to completely ignore them and charge in front of cars and hope they stop. As a fellow Scot I can tell you its the fastest method :)
As for fighting, they do it because their city is so ugly and they wish they were in Edinburgh.
So I went for dinner with some Glasgow friends who are health care professionals on Wednesday night, and they insisted I accept a lift back to the Uni accommodation because they'd seen a number of young men randomly slashed in the face from that part of town. Nice, eh?
I went to Canada last year, and was at first confused by the lights - I wasn't expecting them to let cars drive over the pedestrian crossing while the "walk" light was on.
The British system is to go for safety over efficiency: if the green man is on, cars can't go over the crossing without running a red light. Similarly, we have passing only on the outside on dual carriageways and motorways, instead of the US/Canadian system of being able to pass on either side, because it's safer.
@alex merry
In Canada, pedestrians have right of way at intersections when they have a walk signal. Most Canadian cities are spread out, without many pedestrians, so cars don't have to wait at the lights for non-existant pedestrians to cross.
Cars have trouble turning in places with more pedestrians (like Toronto). They've installed displays with a countdown, but there are still people that think they can cross a street with only 1 second left.
In Canada and USA, you're only supposed to pass on the left (inside lanes). I find that drivers in the US are better for that. In Canada (at least Southern Ontario), there are a lot of drivers that don't switch back to the right lane after they've passed. That causes other drivers to pass on the right, because we can't pass otherwise. This is a pet peeve of mine.
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