As a pedestrian, it’s important to stay safe while walking on the road.
Let’s be real.
Nobody wants to get hit by a car or run over by a truck.
Pedestrian vehicle accidents like this are extremely dangerous—and they can lead to injury, or possibly even death.
With that being said, learning how to stay safe is an important part of the process of avoiding these things.
Unfortunately, many drivers out and about in the world today are constantly distracted by their phones and or other factors.
This means that if you ever walk near a road, you’ll always be assuming at least a small bit of risk of getting involved in a pedestrian vehicle accident.
So in this blog post, you’re going to learn 5 methods that you can use to stay safe on the road as a pedestrian.
These tips may not protect you from every potential disaster—but at the very least, they can help you to equip yourself to be as safe as possible.
Let’s dive into it.
1. Pay Attention
Paying attention to surrounding traffic and the layout of the road near your vicinity is crucial for staying safe as a pedestrian while you’re out and about walking around.
For example:
As cars pass by you, you should always be keeping an eye on their trajectory, direction, and velocity.
If it looks like there’s a potential chance that a car could pass too close to you (or directly over or through your location), then you should immediately take action to protect yourself.
You should also pay attention to the overall flow of traffic, and try to determine whether or not you’re at risk on your current walking path.
Sometimes, travel on some streets just so happens to be pretty calm—while traffic on other streets can tend to be really crazy and dangerous at specific parts of the day.
These are important things to pay attention to.
2. Obey Traffic Laws
As a pedestrian, it’s in your best interest to obey the pedestrian traffic laws as you make your way from point A to point B.
This could mean waiting for walk lights to turn green, staying within the confines of crosswalks, avoiding walking on the road, and just, in general, giving cars the right of way when they’re legally supposed to have it.
Remember, traffic laws exist to keep everyone safe.
And as a pedestrian, it’s definitely in your best interest to obey them. You stand to get injured the worst if you get involved in an automobile accident—so it’s really important to take this seriously
3. Stay Out Of The Normal ‘Flow’ Of Traffic
As you walk from place to place and navigate your path to your destination, it’ll be important for you to make sure that you’re not accidentally walking in areas where you can expect a flow of traffic.
In other words, if your pathway would lead you across a span of the city where there’s no walkway, where you’d be forced to walk on the road, you may want to plan a detour and choose a pathway that won’t take you directly through harm’s way.
As a general rule, walking where traffic is intended to go is always a bad idea!
4. Practice Heightened Situational Awareness
While there are a lot of pedestrian automobile accidents every day, the fact remains that, for the most part, vehicles and people tend to maneuver around each other with relative safety all over the world, every day, to a pretty significant degree.
With that being said, it’s always important to practice situational awareness whenever you are traveling by foot through an area where there are vehicles driving and being operated.
This is just common sense—but a lot of people forget it.
When you are accustomed to staying safe while walking along the road, it’s easy to get lulled into a ‘false sense of security’ and to stop paying attention to all the potential dangers that exist on the periphery.
So always try to keep an eye out for things that could go wrong.
Always try to keep an eye out for potential disasters that haven’t quite manifested themselves yet.
You never know when keeping an extra eye out for your own safety might just save your life.
5. Make Sure To Have A Good Lawyer
Listen, nobody wants to think about the possibility of needing to lawyer up as a result of a pedestrian traffic accident.
However, it happens—and if by some chance you were to get involved in this type of accident, it would be crucial for you to get a professional, locally based lawyer on your side who could protect your interests and get you the compensation you deserve.
Insurance companies will always try to take advantage of you. This seems like a sad fact considering how injured you can be after getting struck by a vehicle, but it happens.
So make sure you’ve got a great lawyer in your back pocket so that you’ll always be protected and have someone to fight for you in the legal system.
Conclusion
Hopefully, this post has given you some great tips and information that you can use to stay safe as a pedestrian on the road.
Listen, this isn’t always fun stuff to talk about.
But it’s important to keep it at the front of your mind.
Stay safe out there.
Be careful.
