Another thing is that if you surprise people by warning them before you overtake they will scatter, to minimise the number who get eaten. Unfortunately this also increases the likelihood of a collision.

I too have been a tourist in New York, but not in the current millennium. My wife is an architect and she loves the flatiron building. Our house is full of pictures of it.

I was never a native New Yorker, but I moved like one. I wasn’t a tourist by any sense of the definition, and was annoyed as everyone else by the tourists. I can totally appreciate the demarcation and would be firmly planted, er, briskly walking, on the New Yorkers side.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sibadd/3333688893/

I mean, what is it with tourists that they step off the top of an escalator and stand there vaguely puzzled as to what to do next? Get out of my bloody way, that would be a good thing to begin with. Also, when you walk onto a platform, either turn left or right if you enter at the middle or carry on walking a bit if you’re at one end. Don’t, for the love of all that is good, just stop. And that goes for when you board a train too. Congratulations, you’ve made it aboard some of TfL’s ancient, cramped, non-aircon’d rolling stock! Believe it or not, some of us behind you would like to do the same!

Um, does it show that I commute daily via the London Underground?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/adrenalinesleep/4624839144/

My first thought was “what a dick”. Then I remembered most of the art I like is kind of dickish.

#1- walk like you’d drive! Stay right, don’t step out of a store without looking whose path you’re stepping into, don’t weave back and forth, look over your shoulder before suddenly ducking left or right, don’t stop suddenly.

#2- Don’t have your large group meetings right in the middle of the sidewalk, nor walk slowly all in a line across the sidewalk.

#3- Don’t stop in doorways or at stair or escalator landings to open umbrellas, check maps, make phone calls, etc.

#4- Don’t walk or loiter with a lit cigarette dangling from your hand where people are likely to brush against it on a crowded sidewalk.

#5- especially mind all of the above where the sidewalk is already obstructed with construction bridges, pushcarts, sidewalk cafes and street vendors.