The real reason Walkers behaves differently than people assume

People talk about walkers like they’re predictable: set them moving, and they’ll do what you expect - drift left, bunch up, speed up when you’re late. Then you see the message, “it appears you haven't provided any text to translate. please provide the text you would like me to translate into united kingdom english.” and you realise how often we misread what’s actually happening in front of us. In day-to-day life - pavements, stations, shopping aisles, office corridors - walkers aren’t “random”; they’re responding to rules you don’t notice until they break.

I clocked it one wet lunchtime near a zebra crossing, watching a stream of people slide around a couple with a buggy. Nobody said anything. Nobody signalled. Yet the whole flow reshaped itself in seconds, like a shoal turning.

The strange part wasn’t the movement. It was how confident everyone was that the couple were being “inconsiderate”, when the real cause was something else entirely.

The assumption: people walk like individuals

We narrate walking as personal choice. You’re fast or slow. You’re polite or oblivious. You “hog the pavement” or you “overtake properly”. It’s a tidy story, and it’s comforting because it makes problems feel solvable: if people behaved better, the path would clear.

But walkers rarely behave as pure individuals for long. Put humans in a shared space and you get a system, not a collection. Speed, spacing, eye-lines, bags, prams, kerbs, phone screens - all of it becomes a set of constraints that quietly decide what “normal” looks like.

That’s why the same person can seem considerate on a wide promenade and maddening on a narrow pavement. They didn’t suddenly develop a new personality. The environment changed the rules.

The real reason walkers behave differently: micro-negotiations you can’t see

Most pedestrian movement is a constant stream of tiny bargains made at the edge of awareness. A half-step to the left, a slight deceleration, a glance that says “you go”, a shoulder angle that says “I’m coming through”. When it works, it’s invisible. When it fails, it feels like rudeness.

A few forces do most of the work:

• Line-of-sight: people steer where their eyes can “read” a clear route. Blind corners, umbrellas, hoods, and crowds remove that information and cause hesitation.
• Speed-matching: we unconsciously synchronise pace with whoever is immediately ahead, especially in tight spaces where overtaking is socially risky.
• Space protection: bags, elbows, prams and dogs create “soft boundaries” that others respect more than they admit, widening the effective body.
• Cognitive load: phones, stress, finding an address, shepherding children - all reduce the brain’s spare capacity for smooth navigation.

Put those together and you get the behaviour people mislabel as selfish: the sudden stop, the slow drift, the diagonal cut across a walkway. Often it’s not entitlement. It’s a person trying to regain information and control.

Why it feels personal when it’s actually mechanical

The brain hates uncertainty in shared spaces. When someone slows in front of you, your body has to adjust - and it reads that adjustment as a minor threat to your momentum, time, and safety. So you assign motive: “They don’t care.”

Meanwhile, the person in front is usually reacting to something you can’t see yet: a kerb drop, a cyclist, a puddle, a child veering, a doorway opening. They’re not “blocking”; they’re solving a problem one beat before you notice it exists.

This is also why groups seem so “bad” at walking. A group isn’t one walker, it’s a moving conversation with shifting attention. Their eye-lines point at each other, not the path, which reduces the quality of those micro-negotiations with strangers.

The quiet triggers that make everything worse

Some settings reliably produce friction because they strip away the cues that walkers use to coordinate.

Narrow space plus mixed speeds

A two-metre pavement with commuters, tourists, pushchairs and delivery riders is basically a human multi-lane road with no markings. People default to the safest strategy: follow the person ahead and avoid risky overtakes. The result is bunching, then irritation, then abrupt lane changes.

Ambiguous priority

At station exits, near bus doors, at the end of escalators - nobody’s sure who “goes”. That ambiguity creates micro-standoffs: tiny pauses that ripple backwards and feel like chaos.

Hidden obstacles

Wheelie bins, A-boards, parked e-scooters, puddles, scaffolding poles. Walkers compress into the remaining corridor, and the crowd behaves differently because it has to: tighter spacing, less time to negotiate, more body shielding.

Rethink the problem: it’s not manners, it’s signals

If you want smoother movement - for yourself and everyone around you - think in terms of making your intentions legible. It’s the pedestrian equivalent of indicating.

A few small habits change everything:

• Commit to a side early on narrow pavements; late swerves cause collisions.
• Look through the gap you’re aiming for, not at the person you want to avoid. Your body will follow your eyes.
• When you need to stop, step out of the flow first, then check your phone. Doorways and escalator landings are the worst places to “park”.
• Overtake like you mean it: a clear, decisive pass is kinder than hovering in someone’s personal space.

None of this requires being faster or more “dominant”. It just reduces uncertainty - and uncertainty is what turns walkers into obstacles in each other’s stories.

What to notice next time you feel blocked

Try this the next time you’re stuck behind someone slow: look past them and scan for the thing they might be reacting to. A narrowing path, a kerb, a child, a sign they’re reading, a puddle they’re avoiding, a friend they’re trying not to lose.

Nine times out of ten, you’ll spot the trigger and your irritation will drop, because the behaviour stops being “mysterious”. It becomes physics: limited space, limited information, competing goals.

Walkers aren’t worse than people assume. They’re more predictable - just not in the way we’ve been taught to notice.