Hold the line
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How often do you walk along a fairly busy street, particularly in a largely pedestrian area? If you’re anything like me, you'll walk the same routes a lot. Working in the middle of Coventry means that I have to walk through the city centre on a daily basis. Before I started frequenting this journey, however, it never occurred to me quite how arduous a task it could be.
The problem isn't the journey itself. Admittedly I'm no exercise fanatic—far from it—but I'm by no means unfit. The problem is other pedestrians. On a journey where you might need to cross a road, for example, you pretty much know where you stand (out of the way, ideally). Cars and other vehicles have allocated lanes and (generally) they stick to them. Pedestrians don't.
On a typical walk way, there's usually enough space for at least two people to walk comfortably side by side without any uncomfortable proximity or potential lawsuits. If these two people are walking in opposite directions, that should mean that they can quite happily walk past each other without any real inconvenience to either party. This is all well and good, but at peak times—especially in busy city centres—the logic starts to come apart at the seams.
Suddenly, on the same walkway, you have lots of people on the same path and if they're not all going in the same direction, for some incomprehensible reason, anarchy ensues. There can be any number of reasons for it. Perhaps two people in a group know each other and wish to walk side by side to continue their conversation. Perhaps one person walks faster than the person walking in the same direction in front of them and therefore wants to overtake. Without warning, we suddenly have too many people walking next to each other and bidirectional traffic becomes problematic. (I can feel a movie script in the making.)
Now, logic would dictate that in these situations, we simply fall into a single file line for a brief period while the on-coming pedestrians get past. But, and this is the part that puzzles me, such logic is almost completely lost on so many people in this situation. Rather than simply following the line set by the person walking in the same direction in front of them, people seem inclined to be individual at the most inconvenient of times and make others walk around them.
Regardless of the size of the walk way, the problem scales up accordingly. Make the path a hundred metres wide and sooner or later somebody is going to have to give way to somebody else when it gets a bit busier. And all because some people are so insistent on holding their otherwise unique line.
Sad to say, I've succumbed to the concept of 'if you can't beat them, join them'. I'm using my 6'6" stature and quick pace to hold my own sensible walking line and hope that the more inconveniently individual pedestrians will take a hint. Admittedly, most of the time I'm too polite to see it through, but with any luck they'll eventually get the message just as I weave around them at the last minute.