Walk This Way

I confess I cannot read, hear or speak that phrase "Walk this way" without thinking of that movie, I think it was YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN with Gene Wilder, in which the hunchback butler says "Walk This Way", and the person following him mimics his slouching, lumbering walk, and how funny my whole family and I found it.

My father thought it was so funny he decided to repeat the phrase, and often. Unfortunately, he never repeated it right, and wound up saying "Walk Like This", which, you know, doesn't quite deliver the joke.

But that is beside the point. I bring up walking because I recently heard a slightly unbelievable but true story on NPR. Oxford Street in England, a very popular shopping and business thoroughfare, apparently has issues with pedestrians. The people who are there to browse and window shop walk too slowly, looking around, and gumming up the works, getting in the way of the business people who are trying to actually get from one place to the next in a timely manner.

By way of a solution, some sort of group, maybe a city office, is trying to create two lanes of traffic on the sidewalk: a lane for slow walkers, and a lane for fast.

As a former New Yorker, and a person who generally walks quickly, I kind of love that idea. Nothing used to drive me more insane than getting stuck behind people who were walking so slowly through the streets of Manhattan that they were essentially going backward. I would rush past them, muttering something like "Stop Dawdling!" or "Good God, Man, get out of my way!!!".

I do enjoy the image of this white line drawn down the middle of the sidewalk with the lanes indicated by signs saying something like "The Move-it-or-Lose-It lane" and the "Thumb-up-Ass" lane.

The NPR reporter took the whole thing very seriously. How, he wondered, would it be enforced, these two lanes? Who would be the judge of what was a fast pace and what was slow? I have to admit, those are good questions.

Would London actually pay police officers to stand on the sidewalks and time people? Measure their actual walking speed? Give tickets for walking fast in the slow lane and slow in the fast lane? Undercover cops who would disguise themselves as fast walkers and tackle anyone walking too slowly in the fast lane, or trip someone walking too quickly in the slow?

The best part of this, however, was when the reporter introduced a representative from the All-England Pedestrian League. That isn't the actual name, but it was something like that, and it is an honest-to-goodness organization that exists only to champion the rights of pedestrians, and they are vehemently opposed to these sidewalk lanes, because they are staunchly against anything that infringes on a pedestrian's right to walk on any part of the sidewalk they please.

I'm sorry, but are they serious? This is an actual organization with actual paid employees who sit around all day and worry about people who....walk??!! This could only be thought up by a person who has drunk one too many pints of lager and eaten one too many fried food items.

What's next? The League of Tooth Fairies (although, actually, for England, that might not be such a bad idea); The Organization of Feet-Pickers; The League of Women Tooters; The Anti-Parking Space Association (for those who object to parking spaces because they should be allowed to park wherever they like); The Anti-Red-Light-League ("Nobody tells me when to stop and when to go!!!); while they're at it, why not object to lanes on streets and freeways ("Lanes?! We don't need no stinking lanes!).

Sorry, I'm ok, really. What do you think?

Do you find some of these organizations as insane as I do?

Would you object to a sidewalk with a fast and slow lane? Are you a fast walker or a slow one? Are you one of those people who think you walk fast, when in fact you walk so slowly you might as well be standing still? Do you find yourself walking with someone who suddenly shakes you to make sure you are, in fact, still awake?