Count-down, wind up

This time last year I wrote about the growing phenomenon of "footpath rage" in our towns and cities. A particular problem in Dublin, as I said, where increasing numbers of busy executives - often young men in a hurry - share pavement space with even more numerous but slow-moving shoppers, including many overseas visitors unused to walking on the same side as us.

With Christmas (not to mention my deadline) fast approaching, this seems like a good time to revisit the issue, and to ask what the authorities are doing about it. The situation is especially critical this year because the entire city is being dug up. Everywhere you turn, holes are being excavated; whether by the ESB, Bord Gais, LUAS contractors, Corporation water workers, the 33 different telecommunications companies, or just the various community and voluntary digging groups.

Many of them appear to be excavating sites that have only recently been filled in: they may be searching for missing pedestrians, for all I know, but the result is chaos. Rogue archaeologists are probably taking advantage of the confusion to dig their own holes in busy streets, while the Mountjoy Prison escape committee could open a tunnel on the North Circular Road tomorrow and it would be days before anyone noticed.

There is some good news for pedestrians, however. As you may have read, the city fathers have installed "count-down" screens on a number of the city's traffic lights, showing the amount of time to elapse before the little green man next appears. This allows people to see "something specific happening", as a spokesman said, and prevents them doing other things, such as trying to stop the traffic by throwing themselves in front of a bus.

I welcome this development. And I trust that over time the range of pedestrian entertainment options will be extended to include computer games, fruit machines and perhaps even feature-length movies. These would help pass the time at some traffic lights, like the one on College Street near our office, where the next little green man to appear could well be from Mars.

Until now, the main form of entertainment for people waiting to cross was the "pedestrian button". This was often a mere placebo, of course. But for a simple idea it worked amazingly well, as each arriving pedestrian would try his or her luck, using different techniques and combinations - maybe head-butting the box, for example - until someone made the light change.

The introduction of the count-downs is a long-overdue admission that the public has lost faith in this process. Belief in pedestrian buttons has declined alongside church attendance; although the truth is that as long ago as the 1970s, when both were still at their height, many people were going through the motions, pressing the buttons (literally or metaphorically) and then crossing anyway before the lights changed.

Aside from count-down screens, however, there is no sign yet that we are facing up to the other causes of footpath-rage, most of them stemming from the hugely increased use of pavements and pedestrianised streets.

In Dublin, personal space has been shrinking at the same rate as house-size in recent years as ever greater numbers of tourists and overseas workers servicing the booming economy combine with a situation in which fewer and fewer locals are taking the option of staying at home and for God's sake watching television or something.

I hadn't realised just how crowded the city was until a few months ago when I had to carry several bags of sand from a toy shop to a nearby car-park, and in the space of just a few hundred metres, hundreds of people got in my way, many of them deliberately. And while I knew that I might have been getting in their way, too, if any of them had chosen to point this out at the time, I would have shovelled sand down their throats.

Such tensions will be heightened in coming weeks, fuelled by other factors we continue to ignore at our peril. We rightly criticise drivers using mobile phones, for example, but still we tolerate their use by pedestrians - some of them holding highly-complex financial and legal discussions while negotiating crowded streets (with holes in them). And bad as it is when people are just talking, the recent shift to text-messaging, especially among younger footpath users, has been alarming.

As Christmas nears, the risk of injury to other pedestrians from violently gesticulating phone users or sandbag-wielding shoppers, not to mention Dublin's notoriously aggressive buggy-pushers who cut through streets like small combine harvesters, increases dramatically. And yet it's hard to know what to do about it.

My suggestion is that when the Garda unveils Operation Rudolph, or whatever it is this year, to help seasonal traffic flow, some resources could be diverted towards pedestrian control. A garda at the door of each of the big department stores, directing shoppers in and out of the main pedestrian traffic routes would be a help; while undercover officers could be on the look-out for erratically-moving phone users and pull them over for warnings.

And maybe alongside the count-down clocks at traffic lights, we could find a use for left-over millennium candles. My idea is we light them under the pedestrian buttons, and pray until the little green man appears.

fmcnally@irish-times.ie