I woke up one morning to find that all the zebra crossings in my city had gone !
What happened ? Have people stopped crossing roads ?
Or have the PETA and SPCA and other Animal Rights activists finally put their foot ( or is it feet ?) down and ensured that humans can’t walk over zebras any more , even if they aren’t really live animals ?
When zebra crossings become sunny sides up .
I don’t know whose idea it was to paint the white stripes on the road into bright yellow and white.
Because that is what happened overnight the zebra crossings became yellow and white . Now we can’t call them zebra crossings any more.
So what do we call them? Sunny sides up? Because quite frankly, when I first saw them, the first thing I thought of was a crisply fried egg with a sunny, runny yolk.
If the animal activists had objected to the use of “Zebra Crossing”, surely the “Heritage Committee ” or perhaps the Urban Development department could have come up with another colour.
With political correctness being the order of the day, had the crossings been marked pink, it might have annoyed the feminists who probably thought it was making fun of women who can’t cross the road.
Or if they had painted it green, the greens would have objected because their movement was being mocked and run to the ground.
You get the drift don’t you. Colour has lost its colour so to speak, and has taken on different meanings. I mean no longer is a colour free of any associations or slights and every colour risks offending some group or the other.
So in that respect perhaps yellow is more neutral – it only signifies cowards and aren’t we all cowards when it comes to crossing the road when cars are whizzing past ?
Ostensibly, this is some kind of fluorescent paint that makes it easier for motorists to spot while driving at night .
But hello ! This crossing is painted outside a school! Not only is this a regular day school for girls but it is also run by an order of nuns whose convent is in the same premises. Thanks to the pandemic, this school ( like many others) has been closed during the pandemic but even if there are no children studying at school during night time, the nuns are definitely NOT crossing this road after sunset .
Doesn’t really matter if it’s Black & White
Lastly, our motorists are known to be particularly unmindful of pedestrians and actually speed up while approaching a cross road or pedestrian crossing so it doesn’t really matter if the crossings are painted black & white or yellow & white.
As a matter of fact, I’ve wondered why these were called zebra crossings in the first place. I know that zebras are black and white like these stripes on the road but it’s not meant for zebras to cross.
I remember reading a sign on a small road which said make way for the “squirrels to cross.”
But have you ever seen a ZEBRA cross the road?
Definitely, not, me!
Ciao
Twenty- five Seven 