Pushy pram-owners or reckless runners: Who has right of way on a footpath?

Many different pedestrians use the footpath, but who has right of way? As a runner, I feel I’m entitled to it, yet dog-owners and pram-pushers think otherwise.
R.R., St Ives, NSW

A: A footpath was once a place of honour. A place where the elderly and newborns got right of way, where the infirm and wide-of-girth were given clear passage, where dog owners pulled their dogs to the side to let passers-by pass, the dogs tipping their hats and saying, “How dee doooooo.” It was a golden age of civility and courtesy and talking dogs in hats. A footpath had rules: pedestrians kept to the left, always moved at a moderate pace and, if someone needed to overtake, they checked for oncoming traffic, indicated with their blinking eyes, then accelerated by manually shifting into a higher gear (pedestrians knew how to walk stick-shift back then, a skill sadly lost).

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But what’s happened to honour? A footpath is now a lawless frontier of carnage: a bloody battlefield where the only victors are the recklessly paced, the intimidatingly muscly, the phone down-headed and the hot-boddedly sexy who distract us for a moment and make us bump into bus-stop benches. Nobody keeps to their lanes; it’s just a game of chicken. Right of way goes to whoever’s coming at you with the most unwavering trajectory, forcing you to dive into shopfront doorways or leap off a kerb into oncoming traffic.

Tragically, that might be your answer. Whoever wants it most gets right of way: the zippy-legged joggers, the zombie-eyed device-starers, the obliviously romantic hand-holders, the hatless-dogged dog-walkers and the pushy-arsed parents driving wide-load prams with 18 wheels and a roo bar. The rest just have to creep along the edges, tiptoeing sideways.

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