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by YeGoblynQueenne 3904 days ago
"The very slowest people" are actually the majority: the elderly, the very young, the temporarily or permanently disabled- if you put all of those people together they're many more than the young, strong and fast.

What's more important, each and everyone of us, will inevitably, at some point in their lives be very young, elderly or disabled. In fact most of us will probably be each of those things during our lifetime.

So it's not so much a matter of efficiency as accepting the fact that human beings are not born with wheels, but with feet and that they should always get priority, despite any misunderstandings about what the purpose of "efficiency" is in the first place.

1 comments

>"The very slowest people" are actually the majority: the elderly, the very young, the temporarily or permanently disabled

That is quite simply not true. http://www.censusscope.org/us/chart_age.html As you can clearly see, most of the population falls in the age range that has no trouble walking at a reasonable speed. I don't have exact figures on how much of the population is disabled or seriously injured at any given time, but experience says it's not enough to make up for the fact that the very young and the very old are very very far from constituting a majority.

I'll qualify my comment: "the very slowest people" are the majority _in the developed world_ where the median age is 35+ (Wikipedia). It's also where people are the most likely to use hoverboards.

In any case, you can dispute the numbers and it makes no difference. People are not born with wheels. We need space to walk about. By convention and by law, the pavement is not for vehicles.

Despite that, I'm prepared to share the pavement with people on wheels but it has to be absolutely clear that it's not my responsibility to avoid them. It's theirs. They are the ones choosing to put me at risk, they should take full responsibility for it. And watch where the bloody heck they go.