The Art Of Crowd Weaving

I was walking through the mall with a girlfriend a while back during a shopping mission; I believe I was on the hunt for a pair of pants. Unfortunately, it was a Saturday afternoon and the mall was packed with teenagers, mothers with children and strollers, fellow focused shoppers, lollygaggers, and the usual suspects who frequent the mall. I am not a mall person for a lot of reasons and having to dodge other shoppers is pretty high on that list. To make getting through the mall a more efficient and productive experience, I tend to walk wherever there is room. My friend followed me for a bit as we swerved around the center kiosks, split hand-holding couples down the middle, and crossed left and right to the cleanest walking path available. Finally, she looked at me half-laughing and half-crazed with my crowd weaving antics and said that walking should be just like driving. Keep to the right.

I don’t necessarily disagree. We went to the right and stayed on the right but would try to get into the “people passing lane” to get around the slow pokes as often as possible. I get that this is a more civilized way to walk so that you are not hitting foot traffic head on. If everyone recognized the structure that keeping to the right provides in public places, crowd weaving might not be so essential for getting through busy places. Walking on the right, with the flow of traffic, also helps reduce the chance of running smack into a display or tripping over a trash can when trying to dodge walkers on the wrong side of the aisle. For the rest of the mall trip, I stayed on the right and on subsequent mall trips by myself, I try to follow that rule but I still err on the side of taking the quickest path through traffic.

Though I respect people who practice proper walking etiquette, I believe that it is truly necessary to have the skill of quickly getting through crowds; it is a matter of survival in public places and not everyone can maneuver through human traffic with the same speed and style. Malls are simply the testing ground for acquiring this skill. Grocery stores provide some opportunity for practice and it’s things like airports, concerts, boat shows, and large public events that require a well-honed crowd weaving technique.

In a crowded convention center at the recent Miami Boat Show I was reminded of my friend’s preference to follow the rule of walking on the right. I had to go from one end of the massive exhibitor hall to the other in a very short time. There were various routes to choose from as the hall has several main aisles with many more intersecting aisles and almost all were filled with tire kickers and lookie-loos as they’re called in the industry. I started out on the right attempting to follow the rules of the road, but soon lapsed into my typical, seemingly unpredictable crowd weaving style. I skirted around strollers, huge support poles, cleaning crews wheeling trash cans, boat displays, ogling shoppers, and scantily clad show girls (it was Miami, after all) in order to succeed in my walking mission. The walk for me was entirely about getting from point A to point B in as little time as possible.

Effective crowd weaving is not only about finding the quickest route, however. It requires tapping into your situational awareness, engaging your peripheral vision, anticipating the movement of others, and reacting graciously (and usually apologetically) during near collisions. Unless everyone learns to keep to the right allowing those in a rush to easily go around them on the left, I maintain that developing the ability to crowd weave is the only way to easily and quickly get from one place to the next.

And when the day comes that I’m not in a walking rush, I’ll gladly keep to the right so my fellow crowd weavers can get by.