a dance and hence the name. Well, it is defined as –
“When you walk up to someone on the sidewalk and you both try to move out of each
other’s way, and in doing so repeatedly move into each other’s way.”
Well, it wasn’t just that. There also happens to be a pedestrian etiquette
to counter this embarrassment. “If you’re headed straight for someone,
both parties should calmly take a step to their right and we can avoid
awkward sidewalk dances forever”.
Although the sidewalk salsa seems to be a legit way to find the person
of your dreams, google did disappoint me in not showing any love stories
that popped up this way.
This isn’t the only dance that pedestrians perform. You might not be-
lieve me, but there’s been a lot of work and research done in this regard.
Ever wondered how people on a busy footpath coordinate their movements in
order to avoid a collision? A neat and intuitive maneuver known as the ‘step-and-
slide’, turns out to be the secret to urban swarm management.
“If sidewalk traffic is dense and collision seems imminent, we pull this two-step pedes-
trian-dance move. While striding forward, the walker turns ever-so-slightly to the side,
leading with his shoulder instead of his nose to turn the step into a side-step. We twist
our torsos, pull in our bellies, and generally avoid all but the mildest brushes of other
people (and if we do brush against someone else, we keep our hands close to our body
and our faces turned away from one another)”
The step-and-slide demands cautious, though subconscious, observation and
looking around at other fellow pedestrians. We draw important cues from the
angle of others’ eyes and the turn of their head. This, of course, leads us to the
inevitable question of what happens when our modern-day mobile phones that
mesmerize us with their siren calls of Whatsapp, Facebook, Instagram, tweets,
and the like — hinder the very ability to notice the body language and indicative
eye gazes of others, which are so critical to the performance of this collective
dance. In other words, even a single mobile user can put the step-and-slide of
several other footpath peers off balance. Evidently, it fails, leading to a variant of
the sidewalk salsa known as the smartphone dance (the same maneuver but with
a smartphone in the hand of one of the two. If both had a smartphone, they’d
necessarily collide)
But the inner optimist in me believes, there would still be people, with a touch
of derealization who would continue to do the good old sidewalk salsa sans the
smartphone. Whatever be it, you just learnt a new excuse for coming late to class.
“Why are you late?”
“I got stuck doing the sidewalk salsa.”
Vasishta Polisetty
3148, Batch of ‘14