Maybe this is another age-related grump
The debate thinggy that regularly features in the Observer New Review this week is Are pedestrian fast lanes a good thing?
Certainly, as someone who tends to move fairly fast and get unwontedly irritated at dawdlers and ditherers - yes, there may be reasons, but if you are going to dither, could you move out of the flow of traffic to do so - I am all for facilitating movement by those who want to move rather than stop dead or meander.
But I also feel - and this may be entirely subjective and unjust - that People These Days are no longer so good at awareness of and negotiation of public spaces as of yore. And that certain kinds of behaviour that were once the Mark of The Tourist now seem to be much more general in my fair city:
Stella Gibbons in Bassett (1934): If a person has earned their living in London for twenty-one years, they acquire a kind of rat-like neatness of behaviour. They can skip quickly from place to place, pop in and out of tea shops, board buses and make sharp little plans which are carried out rat! tat! as deftly as an automatic ticket machine pops out a ticket at Leicester Square tube station. The more obscure and ordinary the person, the more necessary it is that they should acquire this rat-like deftness.
This it seems to me has gone the way of the dodo.
A lot of this annoyance I daresay is down to bad planning (or the contingencies of planning in the palimpsest that is London and its transportation systems) - I have long thought Euston Tube Station was designed by a psychopath, but I do think that shops might bear in mind that people want to move through them, and putting racks of clothes in such a configuration that if one person is standing looking through them, nobody can get past, is not ideal.
I'm not sure that fast lanes, rather that Eeyore's prescription of 'a little consideration, a little thought for others' is really the answer.
If only because I can quite foresee that those people who currently meander to and fro across the pavement, and occasionally stop dead, would very likely do this across any fast tracks. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2360822.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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