Walking Class Heroes

This post was supposed to be about people who don't know how to walk.

New York has something like three times more people crammed into it than Melbourne, which has rightfully forced various unspoken rules as to how to walk down the sidewalk. The flow of pedestrian traffic mirrors that of car traffic:

1. Stay to the right.

2. Pretend you're a car and stay in your goddamn lane.

3. If you want to pull over and look at your map/answer your phone/masturbate, look before you slam into another person.

4. If you want to window-shop, fuck you tourist. You should have figured out what you wanted to buy online before you left Midtown. But you didn't, so there is a designated lane for DUMB, which is right alongside shop windows.

This all makes sense to me. But not to Australians. Even though it may make sense to them to mirror traffic, their instinct is telling them that maybe they should walk on the right, because it's the way God wanted it, but then something reminds them, "wait we do it backwards here mate" and then they get all confused and start dawdling and drooling and pretty soon I'm kicking their children and screaming "This is AMERICA, asshole!" Which it isn't, of course. Whatevs. They know what I mean.

But this isn't about that. Because in my extensive research, wanting to fairly represent the Australian opinion on the matter, I came across another organization lookin' out for the safety of its citizens:

The Pedestrian Council of Australia.











This shit's so exciting that even John Howard (that's the Prime Minister, for the Americans reading this) wrote a letter describing how he splooged a 'roo (man I wish that was a real Aussie phrase) when he heard the council was creating "Walk to Work Day". Well he didn't really, but here it is.




Walk to Work Day, for those of you who haven't fallen asleep yet, counted nearly 1,000 people walking to work that day, and there was an article entitled "Walking Class Heroes" about the event on page 45 of the Canberra City Chronicle.

Holy shit.

But back to safety. So enthusiastic was I over discovering this, I delved further, and realized that the members of the Pedestrian Council of Australia are much like the neighborhood watch alliance in Hot Fuzz and that they are a bit too consumed with the safety of pedestrians. When you click onto "Issues and Policy" I discovered that there may be some serious breaching of safety due to the ever-popular Segway:






















as well as "How they Flout the Parking Laws at Manly". But again, I don't speak Australian. So don't ask me what the fuck that means.