I don't walk down the street any more: these days I swerve, bob and veer my way past most of the other people occupying it. Why don't they look where they're going? Or is it just me? A current TV ad imagines how funny it would be if car-driving behaviour were adopted by pedestrians. Sorry, bright adperson, but your fantasy is no fantasy: I already experience pavement rage, because traversing it has become a species of dodgems.
The street has become an extension of the living-room, used for so much more than walking – lighting up, for example. Smokers, ejected from public buildings, labour under the delusion that outdoors is a giant extractor hood, discharging smells directly into the heavens. They niftily forget that minor natural element known as wind, which can blow with such precision that, without swift evasive action, we passersby can feel like those notorious beagles compelled to puff smoke not of our own producing.
Pedestrians also munch and drink as they walk, not only because of the proliferation of fast food but also because, in our accelerated world, you eat-as-you-go. Any aural clues alerting them to others are muffled by the earphones hooking them up to their iPods. Or they inhabit an even more involving universe – that of their phone. Every second pedestrian is texting or talking on their mobile: walking without texting has become like clubbing without drinking – an unconsummated experience. When the phone was invented, Scientific American reported on how disorientated people felt in this "airy nowhere, inhabited by voices and nothing else – Hello- land". Today, most of those walking down the street are citizens of Helloland, their attention to their physical environment only fleetingly kindled by the odd "watch where you're going, mate".
Watch someone come out a shop and swing right, as though the pavement were grooved for their particular trajectory. Or see how a person rotates swiftly after buying a paper at a stall, oblivious to the possibility that anyone could be behind them. (Recently I stood by a shelf in a shop and a woman reached over and thrust her arm past, a full centimetre from my nose.)
Surely our immersion in virtual worlds is connected with our insensitivity to the physical one. I don't mean that playing Grand Theft Auto makes you mow down pedestrians (the orthodox view is rather that computer games help develop spatial awareness), only that the amount of time so many spend on consoles where they're in control has made them, perhaps, clumsy in actual embodied space filled with unpredictable fellow humans.
Public space has changed – become privatised and more crowded. We need to relearn the skills to share it – the subtle cues of body language that enable us to dovetail on the street without one party scything through the others. Public space is also gendered: I'll bet that a good many of those men who sit happily on buses and trains with their legs wide apart, blithely encroaching on a neighbouring woman's space, exhibit acute spatial awareness when they watch pundits discussing the proxemics of players' relative positions on Match of the Day.
Among touted solutions, Rome has banned summer eating in the streets, Barcelona has suggested segregating jostling tourists in their own pedestrian lanes, and there's even an iPhone Type'n'Walk app supposedly allowing you to see in front of you while texting.
Myself, I fall back on a simple "excuse me", which almost always elicits a "sorry" – confirming my view that the bumpers-into and street blockers aren't being deliberately selfish but simply haven't thought about public space. That's why we need a campaign for spatial equality.