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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

My dream is that one day, everyone will see the imaginary lines down the sidewalk that I do. Keep to the right, just like you're driving, and even someone texting while walking won't run into. Sadly, these lines are imaginary and while people tend to keep right, don't take it very seriously.

A deeper issue is how much of the space between buildings is dedicated to private vehicles. When the sidewalk is 6 feet wide and you're required to social distance by 6 feet past sidewalk cafes and garbage waiting to be picked up, there is no room for pedestrians -- texting or otherwise. Perhaps we should turn the two 8-foot free parking lanes into pedestrian lanes. Then you'd never even notice people walking while texting. Or running 2-abroad. Or kids playing with balls.

It will never happen, though. We need our cars, and more importantly, we need to park them near our high-density housing ;)

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One of my favorite things about NYC is the built-in etiquette of "pulling over" when you need to putz with your phone.

You could always tell who didn't live there by who stopped flat on the street and blocked traffic.

I live in the Bay Area and do that, but it definitely seems like a lot of people don’t here.

Usually I try to stay parallel to other physical barriers like mailboxes, trees, garbage cans, etc. so there is zero possibility I’m in the way of a normal walking path.

There’s a Nathan Pyle comic with this advice: https://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/blogs/business_insid...

Where to walk is also a cultural thing. In many places in Asia, groups of people don't form lanes, but walk "through" each other.

A bit like how in some places there is less of a reliance on traffic rules, instead people watch out for each other more.

Friends have told me that in India you can just cross busy streets by foot and cars will let you pass. If you're from India, please chime in ;-) Here in Germany many would stop at the last possible moment just to make it clear you broke the rules.

If I could pick a skill for everyone out in traffic, I'd definitely choose empathy and patience over seeing imaginary lines.

You can cross busy streets in India on foot - it comes with practice. But doesn't mean drivers wouldn't be aggressive towards you. Pedestrians are almost never given right of way even on designated crosswalks.

> Here in Germany many would stop at the last possible moment just to make it clear you broke the rules.

> If I could pick a skill for everyone out in traffic, I'd definitely choose empathy and patience over seeing imaginary lines.

As someone from Bangladesh, I couldn’t disagree more. Give me rule following Germans any day of the week.

It's an odd kind of rule following though, that includes driving at seventy kilometers an hour down a narrow street just because it's permitted, or roaring past a cyclist with a kid on the bike just because that's also legal.

I don't know if my native country (UK) has unusually good drivers, or if the germans are unusually bad, but my feeling is that german drivers are very good at following rules, and also quite good at killing pedestrians and crashing.

PS: just checked it up on wikipedia, and the data half-heartedly supports my position, depending on what metric you think is relevant. The German death rate from road traffic is relatively low, but the 'road fatality per kilometer' is relatively high. So essentially, when germans do drive, they frequently kill people, but thankfully, they don't do so much driving as other nations do.

>> Where to walk is also a cultural thing.

In NYC (especially in certain parts of NYC of all the places I've been) it is not only a cultural thing but a power-cultural thing. Some people "expect" others to move out of their way, often taking extra space on a sideways or purposefully walking so you need to bunch up against a wall (or jump temporarily into the road.) I've even had someone scold me (while I had right of way on the right side) for not being more courteous.

You can only imagine the sort of behaviors some of these people exhibit in their offices when there is a real hierarchy or power dynamic.

This whole "in a perfect world everyone would walk just like me" is just an attempt to justify the constant loss of walking space to cars since the 1950s.

My dream is that one day pedestrianised spaces would be large enough to allow everyone to use it without compromises.

There is no walking area large enough to spare you from being mindful of others.

Demanding common courtesy from others in shared spaces isn't an attempt to justify anything, much less our car culture.

> Keep to the right, just like you're driving, and even someone texting while walking won't run into.

Do you have different lanes for people who walk at different speeds? Is there one for runners? Am I still allowed to stop and take in the sights?

> Do you have different lanes for people who walk at different speeds?

Just like when driving, if there is enough space, different lanes should form to accommodate different walking speeds. If the sidewalk is too narrow, it's okay to pass, but don't interfere with the other direction of traffic, and don't prevent others from passing you.

Families with strollers are the Hummers of sidewalks.

Motorized mobility scooters are the ones to watch out for.

If a child, woman or old person is coming the other way then I take the side nearest to the traffic to protect them

Yes, I think putting restrictions in place on pedestrians is more likely to have an effect of encouraging more people into cars. Before worrying about what could happen to someone walking around on their phone, how about worrying what could happen due to all the drivers on their phones? Or, as you say, give pedestrians so much space it becomes a non-issue. Why have we given >90% of public space to cars? (I'm assuming your last sentence is tongue-in-cheek.) If we had to redesign society from the bottom up, there is no way we would have done it like this.

And cue the downvotes from everyone who can't imagine life without their car :/

Reminds me of this image from the London blackout [1]. They were more strict about walking on the correct side (in this case left) so people wouldn't run into each other in the dark.

[1] https://geographicalimaginations.files.wordpress.com/2017/09...

>Keep to the right,

Do you then switch to the left when walking in the UK? :)

IMO (in my observation) natives actually instinctively do pick the side of the pavement to walk on as if they were cars on the road...

It's fun then when you have Chinese or American tourists in Japan (Japan is right hand drive)...

That makes sense, as it makes the pedestrians closest to the road face incoming traffic. That makes temporarily stepping onto the road when pedestrian traffic gets too busy for the available width of the sidewalk a lot safer.

(Some, possibly many, countries use the same logic for setting rules for pedestrians walking on the side of a road without sidewalks)

And you likely know it, but in Japan cars drive on the left.

I believe in Japan, people walk on the left side.

Many people in Japan don't drive so they don't really think about "sides" like people who come from car cultures do.

Interesting! That’s a bit surprising to me. In Japan they have the yellow tiles with bumps near the center of most city sidewalks that I always assumed was a kind of lane system. If it’s not to create lanes, what are those tiles for?

They are tactile paving for blind and partially sighted people.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactile_paving

Lanes for the blind.

They come in contact with it though, from those driving around them. Then there are other customs, like standing on the left side of escalators (except for Osaka, where it used to be the right side, but now it's mostly the side the line is already on). From my personal experience people in the major cities seem to prefer dodging to the left, all things being equal.

I didn't say anything about cars and as Hamuko has pointed out, it predates cars. Wikipedia supports this claim, though doesn't cite it.

This. As a driver and a long-term resident in Tokyo, I try to stay to the left as a pedestrian, but I estimate the odds of the other party doing the same are 50/50.

Yeah, and you also see people being paid to direct the flow of human traffic at the super busy stations.

They drive on the left side because they walk on the left side. They say the origin for left-hand traffic in Japan comes from the Edo period where samurai, who wore their swords on the left side, would walk on the left side of the road to avoid clashing swords with each other.

Left hand side vs right hand side has a really complicated history. A lot of Europe was left hand side first as well, although I just learned from Wikipedia that that might be myth:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-_and_right-hand_traffic

Japanese sidewalls are rather paradoxical: where rules and order are so valued, pedestrians are in chaos. People walk 4 abreast, walk in bicycle lanes, randomly change direction without looking etc.

Escalators are even stranger. There are signs everywhere telling people to stand on both sides. These are completely ignoreed. People fill up one side completely and leave the other side empty for the occasional walker.

The escalator one depends on how busy it is. During rush hour or when the line at the "entrance" begins to grow longer the free side gets a lot more traffic, though usually people will still try to walk on that side in order to not block the "fast lane".

^ This guy has really been in Japan! There is no standard of walking on the left or the right. People don't follow vehicle driving protocols because many of them never have or will drive. "Paradoxical" is absolutely the best way to describe Japanese pedestrian behavior.

It depends...

60-Hz AC in Osaka and 50 Hz in Tokyo. Standing on the left of the escalator in Tokyo and on the right in Osaka. Oh Japan..

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2011/07/19/reference/japan...

https://kotaku.com/its-hard-for-japan-to-change-its-escalato...

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