Slow-moving shoppers come under fire

Speedy walkers on Oxford Street may soon find themselves in the fast lane

By Douglas Herbert, CNN.com Europe writer

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Shoppers who dawdle too long on Britain's busiest shopping street could soon face fines if city officials approve a controversial plan to treat idle strollers like outlaws.

Traders on Oxford Street, the capital's premier shopping street and home to flagship department stores such as Selfridge's and John Lewis, are rallying behind a campaign, code-named Operation Tugboat, to divide the jam-packed thoroughfare into fast and slow lanes -- for walkers.

Those in the fast lane would be barred, under the proposal, from listening to personal stereos, eating, talking on mobile phones and taking pictures -- stipulations that sceptics suggest would make the plan as unenforceable as banning prayer in St. Peter's Square.

London's Underground already encourages travellers to stand to the right on its escalators to ease congestion at peak hours, allowing passengers in a rush to hurry through.

	VOX POPS
Fast walker or window shopper: What's your speed?

If such a system could be enforced above ground, campaigners assert, it could significantly cut down on "pavement rage" -- a growing phenomenon that now has its own "awareness week," officially kicking off on Monday in Britain.

Nearly 10 million tourists visit Oxford Street every year, a number compounded by the throngs of natives who descend on the mile-and-a-half-long street every holiday season to gawk at glittery Christmas displays and baubles arrayed in shop windows.

"In an ideal world there would not be any regulation," Rhona Harrison, a spokeswoman for Operation Tugboat, told Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper Monday. "But there are too many people and there is too little space."

Among other measures, the campaign envisions roving curbside "marshals," highway-style speed cameras and directional markers to keep seasonal throngs of tourists and other rubberneckers moving at a minimum speed of three miles per hour.

Slow walkers who straggled into the fast lane could be slapped with a £10 ($14) fine and booted back into the lane reserved for those who are less fleet of foot.

Among those raising early eyebrows at the proposal is Westminster City Council, which has jurisdiction over Oxford Street and must ultimately approve any pedestrian control scheme.

Louise St. John Howe, the chairwoman of Westminster's transportation and highways committee, called the proposal "an interesting idea," but suggested it "looks like a recipe for unnecessary red tape and frustrated shoppers."

"The proposal might help a few but at the expense of the majority of shoppers," St. John Howe said.

Slow movers could be forced away from the Kurb

"We will defend the right of people to walk on the pavement at any speed they choose," she added.

St. John Howe noted that Westminster had already barred all traffic except for buses and taxis on parts of Oxford Street to free up more space for pedestrians and public transport. In addition, she said, pavements had been widened and street crossings revamped in order to smooth the flow of human traffic.

Ben Plowden, director of Britain's Pedestrian Association, said the fast-lane/slow-lane scheme amounted to a noble, though probably unworkable, effort to bring order to one of Western Europe's most teeming thoroughfares.

"Pedestrians, and British pedestrians in particular, are particularly anarchic and don't like being told where to go," Plowden said.

A bolder step, he added, would be to ban all vehicles from Oxford Street, creating a pedestrian-only zone similar to those instituted on similarly busy streets in capitals throughout Europe.

He conceded that figuring out how to reroute vehicles in central London would be a challenge, but hardly an insurmountable one.

"We've put men on the moon, it's not beyond the wit of man (to do this)," Plowden said.

"At the moment, it's the worst of all possible worlds, people spilling off the pavements into the path" of buses, taxis and bicycles, he said.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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Oxford Street Association
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