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Time to test-drive our Covid-aware pedestrian skills

<span>Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo</span>
Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

When you live in Ye Olde Heritage Destinationne, you develop a particular way of moving through space. The narrow streets of my home town, York, are usually thronged with tour group crocodiles, uproarious hens brandishing inflatable phalluses, swishy cloaked Ghost Walk guides and packs of Viking raiders window-shopping at Primark. You’re never safe from weary Instagram boyfriends snapping their partners in front of the cholera burial ground or 20 people joining arms to sway along as a busker murders Ed Sheeran (not literally).

l learned tourist-evasion parkour early: dodging, weaving and sidestepping are second nature. I’m a terrible driver (I once drove into a skip, unprovoked) but a skilled pedestrian, predicting from 100 yards who will stop dead for free fudge samples or veer wildly to examine some decorative drinking horns and course-correcting to avoid them. My defensive walking is no different from the ways anyone living in a big city moves, really, just with more wooden broadswords.

Briefly unnecessary in lockdown, these skills are vital again now. It’s an odd dance we’re doing, isn’t it? Avoiding others feels wrong and rude – it seems to imply we think they are unclean – when of course, it’s really an act of courtesy. I feel embarrassed to step into the road, worried I look like a 17th-century fop, clutching a pomander to my nose and shrinking from the foul vapours of the toothless masses. If anything, I’m more embarrassed when someone thanks me: are they relieved I have removed my pestilent carcass from their path? Obviously, we make the whole business awkward as hell: it’s our British birthright.

l learned tourist-evasion parkour early: dodging, weaving and sidestepping are second nature

Our relationship to public spaces and how we navigate them is a product of who we are and what we know: tiny kids don’t get it at all (it feels sad not to take a proffered leaf or grubby hand); larger ones understandably don’t care. A subset of (awful) couples are apparently welded to each other and older people run a full spectrum from ultra-cautious to madly oblivious.

I find myself observing behaviour partly through the lens of what historian Charlotte Riley described as “patriarchy chicken”. Pre-Covid, Riley challenged herself not to move out of the way for men on her commute and related their reactions (amazed, indignant). Once I had started seeing the unquestioning, confident way men (yes, not all men) move through public space, it was impossible to unsee and I’m watching it evolve around Covid-19. I’ve read plenty of complaints of huffing, jogging gents, but I have also noticed some starting to move in the ways I always have: scanning for hazards, changing trajectory and being cautious. It’s an intriguing shred of democratisation in the civic landscape.

Other good things are happening to cities: from Barcelona to Seattle to London, streets are becoming pedestrian and pavements widening; Paris has turned over parking spaces to become café terraces. There’s hope this might help us wrench our cities back from cars, at least a little. But changing urban geography is hard. My home town is famous for a street so narrow people in houses on opposite sides can shake hands. And how will Venice, with its tiny calleselle, some 60cm wide, manage? I suppose we’ll adapt. Cities are already criss-crossed with desire paths, the routes pedestrians carve out of city geography in defiance of what planners expected, or wanted, them to do. Now pandemic paths are emerging, where tight spots force us to be creative in where we walk, pushing out into roads.

It won’t be enough though; we need a pedestrian code. We’ve always needed it and, ideally, a licence with penalty points: three for walking four abreast, six for looking at your phone while crossing, a year’s suspension for stopping dead at a ticket barrier in rush hour. But now, as we weigh up stepping up into the path of a bus against colliding with a jogger, it’s truly vital.

Test yourself with these three Covid Code theory test sample questions: a coughing gentleman is tailgating you in a narrow alleyway. Do you: A) speed up, B) stop dead to freak him out, or C) press yourself dramatically against the wall and mutter curses?

You are nearing Tesco Metro from the left. A woman staring at her shopping list is approaching from the right. As you reach the door, a man with a tantrumming toddler starts to exit. Do you: A) slow to allow him out, B) attempt to alert shopping list woman, or C) U-turn and go to Sainsbury’s?

Which of the following is an acceptable reason for making an emergency pavement stop: A) forgot your mask, B) sudden onset of vertiginous panic at sight of strangers, or C) Greggs has finally reopened?

If you don’t know the answers, I confess: neither do I, but I’m ready to learn. It took me three tries to get my driving licence, but I’m hoping to nail this first time. I just need to work out those tricky “realising Greggs is finally open” stopping distances.

Follow Emma on Twitter @BelgianWaffling