I was walking along in the drizzle yesterday, passed a young guy about
18yo, wearing headphones, who was crossing the road (single lane each
way, divided by a median strip). A few moments later I heard a brief
skid and a loud thud and turned around in time to see a shoe flying
through the air and a Peugeot 605 grind to a stop.

Amazingly the guy seemed more or less alive, he was sitting in the
gutter and shaking, but not obviously bloody. The 605's windscreen was
badly cracked. Passers-by called an ambulance which was there within
minutes.

Sounds really obvious I know, but still it hammered home to me how
much we rely on our hearing, and I'll now make more of an effort to
persuade my cycling friends that they should not use their walkmans on
their daily commute.