I was in Pine Centre for a while Saturday afternoon, and all I can say is I’m glad most of the people in Prince George don’t drive the way they walk.
Part of that is because a lot of the people in the mall Saturday were way too young to drive, and many of them would have had trouble seeing over the steering wheel and reaching the gas and brake pedals.
Apart from that, I couldn’t help but notice that a lot of the adults were walking in a way that would have had them screaming if someone else drove that way on the road.
Yes, I realize there’s a lot of differences between walking in the mall and driving on the road, but there are some similarities as well.
Given the average speed of people in the mall was lower than the average speed of drivers (on some roads, WAY lower), it was still somewhat frustrating to find people who would have been classed as “Sunday drivers” if they were on the road.
You know the type, moving slower than everyone else, staying in a ‘lane’ which makes it difficult for anyone else to get by, paying absolutely no attention to where they’re going.
The really annoying thing is most of the people I saw on Saturday were not on their cellphones. They were looking ahead of themselves, but apparently not seeing what was ahead of them.
The way some of them were walking, if they had been driving the same way, they would have been pulled over for suspicion of impaired driving. They would wander from one side to the area they were in to the other, forcing other people avoid them, then they would wander back to the ‘lane’ they had been in to start.
And don’t even get me started on the groups of three or four people walking slowly together. What was most frustrating was there was usually about three or four feet between each pair of people in the group, meaning they were stretched out over quite a width of the aisle.
Add to this the whole group was quite frequently drifting from one side to the other, and it made it very difficult for other people to get from Point A to Point B with any haste. I’m not talking about running in the mall, but I usually like to set a reasonably good clip when I’m walking and I couldn’t do that on Saturday.
So please, if you’re walking in a mall or even on the sidewalk, stay to one side, don’t spread your group out across the entire width, and try to walk in a straight line.