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.
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