PAVEMENT ETIQUETTE

Your five-step guide to successfully navigating small towns in England:

1. First, get the terminology correct. The 'pavement' is what Canadians would call a 'sidewalk'. On this side of the pond, it is important to remember that 'pavement' is a specific thing and not the material that makes up roads and, well, sidewalks.

2. Now readjust your thinking. In most modern (i.e., built in the last century or so) North American cities, roads were built with automobile use in mind. In ancient British cities, roads weren't built so much as established over existing footpaths between huts and eventually brick buildings. This means that the space allocated to roads is not typically wide enough for two cars to pass, the ancient Saxons clearly lacking the foresight to predict travel via Volkswagen.

3. Draw your conclusions. In this era of car domination, what little space left for roads is NOT assigned to pedestrians. Hence the pavements are very narrow - you are very lucky if two people can walk side-by-side. This leads to the following common scenario:

















I trust that the diagrams are self-explanatory.

P.S. The quality of my diagrams leaves much to be desired (lost a lot of detail when reduced to fit into the blog), so let me clarify that the legend reads "Person & direction of travel" and that on either side of the people, there are supposed to be lines denoting the wideness of sidewalks and the relative narrowness of pavements. I will try to resolve this technical issue soon but this requires husband-help.