Walk This Way
If they can't even walk, how can you expect them to drive?Over the past several decades, a lot has been written about how poorly people drive. Most such stories bemoan the lack of driving skills displayed by American drivers and sing praises for the European systems of driver's education that stress car control and lane discipline. That's all well and good, but I have begun to suspect that the ability to drive on crowded streets is not so very different from the ability to walk on a crowded sidewalk or airport concourse.
Walking would seem to be a fairly simple thing. Most of us have done it from an early age, and even at a brisk pace a walker isn't traveling at more than 3 or 4 mph. Yet place one inattentive and distracted walker onto a busy sidewalk, and watch the mayhem. Perhaps they are unsure which direction they need to go, or they are talking on a cell phone or listening to music. In any case, their meandering path causes traffic behind them to back up and become irritated with the hold-up. To get by, people change lanes, moving over to pass the offending walker, endangering other walkers who are coming from the other direction. In short, it is the same kind of mess that one inattentive or distracted driver can create on our highways.
Walk through any airport, and see how long it takes before you get frustrated at the person walking in front of you. Now, I am all for every person being allowed to live their life at their own pace. But their pace shouldn't dictate my pace, and if they want to stroll along leisurely, or talk to faraway friends on their cell phones, they shouldn't do so in the fast lane. As strange as it sounds, when people walk, definite lanes form, much the same as the lanes of a highway. The faster people gravitate toward the left-most lanes of flow while the slower ones drift toward the right. Interestingly, in England, where people drive on the left side instead of the right side of the road, the pedestrian traffic patterns are also reversed from other countries. Just as in driving, when walking in Great Britain you must always watch which side of the road you are traveling on. No matter where you walk, should a slow stroller walk into the fast lane, the people behind must either bunch up and begin to grumble or cut around the stroller, either by darting to the right into the lane of slower walkers, and messing up their progress, or by causing a head-on collision with on-coming walkers. In fact, to combat this, a single-file lane of ultra-fast walkers will often form on the far left side of the sidewalk, on the other side of the oncoming traffic to let the really pressed people make their way even more quickly.