Pedestrian 'Right' of Way
Picture it. It’s three sixteen on a Thursday afternoon. Your third class of the day just let out and you’re about to head across campus to your final class of the week. It’s rainy outside, you have no umbrella, and you have exactly fourteen minutes to make it to class on time. You leave the protection of the overhang and enter the crowded flow of students. It could be worse, you think, it could be a downpour. Up ahead there’s a group of five girls walking towards you. They walk side by side, spanning the entire width of the sidewalk. You step as far right on the sidewalk as you can, but as the group approaches, it’s obvious that they don’t plan to adjust their stance. You consider side stepping them and walking in the grass, but you’re wearing a new pair of shoes and the ground is a soggy mess. They’re an arms length away. You stop abruptly as you come face to face with the girl on the end. She looks at you. You look at her. Confused, she falls in behind her friends.
“Did you see that?” the girl asks her friends. “That was rude.”
You sigh. No one has a clue about pedestrian courtesy anymore.
This is especially true—or at least more obvious—in crowded areas like college campuses and shopping malls. From a very early age, we were taught how to walk in public. Kindergarteners everywhere can testify that you should always walk on the right side of the hallway. Not brain surgery, right? Five year olds understand this.
How is it then that grown men and women cannot grasp this concept? At what point in their lives did people begin to think it was acceptable to take up an entire span of walking space because they wanted to walk next to their friends and not behind them?
And that’s only one of the pedestrian courtesies people have started to ignore. How aggravating is it to be walking along and have someone in front of you stop suddenly to talk to a passerby? A casual wave is never enough. They have to stop—in the middle of the sidewalk—and have a fifteen minute conversation about what concert they went to last weekend and which one of their friends stayed out all night with so and so getting hammered. And apparently it’s too much of an inconvenience to step off the sidewalk (or at the very least, move to the edge of it) to have their vital conversation. Never mind that you just ruined your new pair of sneakers to avoid a collision.
It’s not as if it’s necessary to follow traffic rules every time we step outside of our houses. And we’d look ridiculous making hand signals every time we turned a corner. Most of these rules don’t even apply unless there’s a crowd of people all trying to walk in the same area.
It’s important that we have a little courtesy for our fellow pedestrians when we’re walking in a crowd. Conveyor belts haven’t caught on outside of airports, so we need to take it upon ourselves to walk on the right side of the hallway. It’s as fundamental as tying our shoes.
This is especially true—or at least more obvious—in crowded areas like college campuses and shopping malls. From a very early age, we were taught how to walk in public. Kindergarteners everywhere can testify that you should always walk on the right side of the hallway. Not brain surgery, right? Five year olds understand this.
How is it then that grown men and women cannot grasp this concept? At what point in their lives did people begin to think it was acceptable to take up an entire span of walking space because they wanted to walk next to their friends and not behind them?
And that’s only one of the pedestrian courtesies people have started to ignore. How aggravating is it to be walking along and have someone in front of you stop suddenly to talk to a passerby? A casual wave is never enough. They have to stop—in the middle of the sidewalk—and have a fifteen minute conversation about what concert they went to last weekend and which one of their friends stayed out all night with so and so getting hammered. And apparently it’s too much of an inconvenience to step off the sidewalk (or at the very least, move to the edge of it) to have their vital conversation. Never mind that you just ruined your new pair of sneakers to avoid a collision.
It’s not as if it’s necessary to follow traffic rules every time we step outside of our houses. And we’d look ridiculous making hand signals every time we turned a corner. Most of these rules don’t even apply unless there’s a crowd of people all trying to walk in the same area.
It’s important that we have a little courtesy for our fellow pedestrians when we’re walking in a crowd. Conveyor belts haven’t caught on outside of airports, so we need to take it upon ourselves to walk on the right side of the hallway. It’s as fundamental as tying our shoes.
No comments:
Post a Comment