A couple of near misses this morning made me think about how we navigate oncoming foot traffic.
My ten-cent theory for the last couple of years has been that people take cues from other people’s eyes to determine which way they’re going to veer to circumvent a given human obstacle. This led me to believe there would be more awkward shuffling as people double-guessed each other’s path in the summer, because everyone’s wearing shades and you can’t tell where people are looking. Observational data collection for this aspect of the theory will have to wait for a few months.
The mechanics are a bit more complex: two people are looking where they are going. They are primarily scanning for openings, and calculating the velocities of people converging on the openings. When a collision is imminent, person A scans the head of person B to see where its scanning. B is generally scanning over one shoulder or the other of A, so A goes in the opposite direction to the best of their ability. This process short circuits if A and B scan each other at the same time, because they’ll both be waiting for a cue. As they get closer, a sharp turn of the head will signal the other, and they’ll diverge. Sometimes this need to be a full body gesture, and sometimes a Hail Mary dodge is necessary. If all this fails, or competing Hail Marys collide, you’re reduced to the stop and shuffle.
This morning, my subject B went with a full body gesture and brought this all to mind, so I watched the rest of the pedestrians on my commute, trying to see how often this theory held up.
A keen reader will note the basic fallacy of my first assumption. Most people just aren’t watching where they are going. Much of my commuting experience comes from midtown, a virtual wasteland of any human-oriented community structure. It’s business, food, and terrible bars, with wide and crowded sidewalks, the only purpose of which is to serve people in a hurry. Tactical navigation is the only thing to think about. Chinatown paths are narrow and full of residents and things to buy, so a high percentage of people are street and window shopping.
However, at the points before and after the worst of the market areas, the theory seemed sound: there were subtle but noticeable tilts of the head indicating on which side of me the oncoming traffic intended to pass, and even after checking for traffic at crossings, the head would come back to indicate its intended path.
Still, further research is necessary.
