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I live in Toronto, and there is PATH - 30 km (and growing) network of tunnels and concourses connecting major downtown towers, buildings, subway stations and sh

I live in Toronto, and there is PATH - 30 km (and growing) network of tunnels and concourses connecting major downtown towers, buildings, subway stations and shopping malls. It is indispensable in winter and hot summer where you can buy goods and services without ever going outside. The problem with PATH is, ironically, pedestrians. My biggest gripe are people walking slowly, 3 or 4 abreast. The list goes on: stopping and turning 180 suddenly, bumping into each other cutting corners etc. It bothers me enough that I started to fantasize about adopting road-like rules for walking in busy places: no more than 2 persons side to side, no sudden stops, green and red lights in the row of doors to regulate the direction of the flow, cutting corners is only allowed for right turns...

kazinator 12y ago
That's nothing. If you ever enter a big, popular 5 or 10 km running race in Canada, expect people who are running in the "shortest line of sight" sections of the course to suddenly stop, drop and tie their shoe laces, without so much as glancing backwards, even though they obviously know that people are running all around, within two or three feet of each other. Given that runners can't think about others in such a specific situation, you can forget consideration on walkways, which are subject to different concurrent uses. Oh, oh, here is something! Sometimes I do interval training on an outdoor, rubberized running track. For some reason, though the town has many parks, people go to this track to walk around. And they walk around in the inner lane, lane 1! Some of them don't get out of the way and use a different lane when people do running workouts even after being passed several times. The last time I was there, a woman came with a baby stroller, and parked it in the curve, some 15 meters down from the starting line, in Lane 1! Of all the places in the city where you can go with a baby stroller and park it, she picked that spot. The mental process behind that must be astonishing ...

kazinator 12y ago

That's nothing. If you ever enter a big, popular 5 or 10 km running race in Canada, expect people who are running in the "shortest line of sight" sections of the course to suddenly stop, drop and tie their shoe laces, without so much as glancing backwards, even though they obviously know that people are running all around, within two or three feet of each other. Given that runners can't think about others in such a specific situation, you can forget consideration on walkways, which are subject to different concurrent uses. Oh, oh, here is something! Sometimes I do interval training on an outdoor, rubberized running track. For some reason, though the town has many parks, people go to this track to walk around. And they walk around in the inner lane, lane 1! Some of them don't get out of the way and use a different lane when people do running workouts even after being passed several times. The last time I was there, a woman came with a baby stroller, and parked it in the curve, some 15 meters down from the starting line, in Lane 1! Of all the places in the city where you can go with a baby stroller and park it, she picked that spot. The mental process behind that must be astonishing ...