Maximum points must be for stepping out in front of buses, knowing full well that, as with cars, drivers can't stop in time to avoid hitting you, even if they slam on the brakes the instant they see you.
Other variations on the game are parents leaping in front of moving cars, ignoring pedestrian crossings, while dragging small children or pushing prams, and there is a special place in my heart for the death-defying leaps some people make on to intersections when the lights have changed, and traffic is moving.
The casual saunter against the lights is a local thrill, as always looking straight ahead while pretending traffic isn't there, and acting deaf to shrieking brakes.
Listening to music on headphones raises the stakes, as does riding a bicycle, in which case all road rules can be freely ignored.
Driver inattention is blamed for 39 per cent of crashes, and many are caused by a combination of factors. Pedestrians are instinctively aware of that.
It adds to the odds against survival. Only 101 crashes were caused by speeding, the usual culprit in road safety campaigns, out of 648 in total, and of those just 16 involved vehicles driving too fast.
The others involved misjudging the speed people were travelling at, hard to judge when pedestrians spring across the road in front of you.
The small number of just 16 crashes being blamed on speeding drivers alone is inconvenient for the council, because it seems determined to reduce the speed limit throughout the CBD, in the belief that it is drivers who need to change their ways rather than pedestrians.
When speed causes just one sixth of accidents that doesn't seem to make sense.
What about giving pedestrians on-the-spot fines for taking part in the city's road sport?
But the council intends to spend $100,000 on campaign to tell them what they learned at their mother's knee, and got bored with remembering. The Automobile Association's view seems to make more sense, that slower traffic could well cause even more false confidence among pedestrians and hence more accidents.
An equally daring practice in this city is practised by young women who walk alone down poorly lit walkways at night, with no hope of help or witnesses should they be attacked. The women reason that they should have the right to walk anywhere without being molested, though they know full well that some men are not remotely interested in that point of view, and consider them fair game.
Two women have been attacked recently in an area some Victoria University students are calling "Rape Alley", a route between the university and The Terrace.
Students are demanding that somebody do something about this problem - though evidently not themselves - because of the rights issue.
In response, they are advised not to walk there alone, the preferred mode of older women who've learned the wisdom of it from bitter experience. There should be an ideal world in which some men never become sexual predators, I agree with the students on that point. But change in the male brain may well take millennia and, in the meantime, it would be prudent to not give deviants an even break.
