Why can’t we have traffic laws for pedestrians?
Imagine you’re driving down Piccadilly one day. Suddenly, without the slightest warning, you brake to a halt, causing the car behind to smash into you. Or you change lanes without indicating, right into the path of someone who’s overtaking. Or you change direction completely, executing a perfect one-eighty into the oncoming traffic. What sort of punishment would you expect? Forget points on your licence, you’d be scratching the days on your cell wall. Yet repeat these crimes in their two-footed versions on Piccadilly’s pavement and no one will say a thing. Not to your face, that is. Inside it’s different. Inside they’re dreaming of attaching you to the nearest lamppost à la Mussolini.
Why can’t we regulate pedestrians in the same way that we regulate our roads? Admittedly cars kill and people don’t. Not those doing the cutting up, anyway; one of these days a cuttee might make the lamppost scenario come true. But trying to get anywhere in a busy city is a nightmare, stragglers and weavers and map-studiers blocking your route at every point. Each tourist stopping to consult the guidebook adds another few notches to the blood pressure.
The solutions could be so easy. Pedestrian lanes, for a start. The outside of the pavement for people who want to maintain a decent pace, the inside for those who want to point at French Connection’s window and say, ‘You’d look great in that, Debs.’ This proposal actually found its way into the manifesto of a national political party once. (The fact that it was the Monster Raving Loony Party needn’t detain us here.)
Not every problem is due to lack of consideration. Some are down to simple confusion. When you’re heading directly towards someone coming in the opposite direction, for instance, and neither of you knows which way to swerve. Inevitably you both go the same way, then equally inevitably you both correct yourselves, the process repeated until you are inches from collision. If the government issued a ‘keep left’ decree we’d all know where we stood. Or walked.
Similarly it’s over-politeness that causes another dilemma. Two people need to get through a gap big enough only for one. (In London, the tiny entrance to St Christopher’s Place from Oxford Street is a bugger for this.) ‘After you,’ says the first. ‘No, after you,’ replies the second. Then there’s a short wait as you smile nervously at each other, neither of you moving, the British equivalent of a Mexican standoff. Finally you both head for the gap at exactly the same moment, causing the very problem you were trying to avoid in the first place. Another decree will do it: ‘The first person to say “after you” is obeyed.’ End of impasse.
In some cases, though, we’ll be working against the grain of people’s instincts. There is something encoded deep in the psyche of a large number of British citizens, for example, that makes them incapable of queuing for a cashpoint in any other way than at right angles to the bank. That this blocks the pavement doesn’t seem to register. If someone spends too long checking their balance, Regent Street grinds to a halt. The real injustice is that it doesn’t matter whether most people in the queue feel guilty about holding everyone up — it only takes one right-angler to set the precedent. After that the rest quietly comply. God knows what the solution to this one is. A while ago I found myself joining a queue that was blocking Long Acre in Covent Garden, forcing people out into the traffic. Nervously I suggested to the guy in front of me that we move out of the way. He looked stunned for a moment, then broke into a smile. ‘I’ve always wanted to say that,’ he said. ‘This is madness, isn’t it?’ We retreated to the wall, feeling like founder members of the Republic of Common Sense. Soon the last of the right-anglers was getting his cash, leaving just our bit of the queue. It really looked like we’d done it, like we’d broken the spell.
Then a woman came and stood in the middle of the pavement. ‘Excuse me,’ we said, pleasantly. ‘We thought we’d queue here, to stay out of people’s way. Would you like to join us?’
Ignoring the streams of pedestrians making their way around her, she looked at us as though we were the mad ones. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s all right. I’ll queue here.’
What can you do? Rooftop snipers, perhaps?
Mark Mason’s Walk the Lines: the London Underground, Overground is published by Random House.
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