Business people, workers should be provided with dedicated fast lanes on city pavements (sidewalks)

I negate the following resolution: Business people, workers should be provided with dedicated fast lanes on city pavements (sidewalks). I interpret the resolution to mean on ALL city pavements. Otherwise, my opponent could win by just defending the Oxford Street project in London. I define city as having a population over 100,000. By this definition, there are 276 cities in the United States. [1] I would like to begin by stipulating that I agree with the Oxford Street project in London, but disagree with the broader resolution for a number of reasons: 1. "Business people" is an unfair and arbitrary designation A much better resolution would read: tourists should get slow lanes on tourist-heavy streets, which seems to be the intent of the Oxford Street project. Tourists would get slow lanes and local residents, who do not stop to sightsee, get a fast lane. My opponent, however, thinks that non-business people's time is not valuable. My opponent specifically says in his case that it is okay for a housewife to be stuck behind "the mentally retarded, tourists, the morbidly obese and tramps." Housewives do important work – they're raising the next generation of young people! So many marriages have come to an end because of this type of attitude – that housework/raising the kids is not "real work." The tourist/local resident distinction seems so much fairer than the businessperson/non-businessperson distinction. I doubt this policy would even work in the United States; it likely would not pass muster when challenged in the court system under non-discrimination laws. In addition, the policy is unfairly discriminatory against college students. I'd like to note, ironically, that my opponent seems more concerned with prostitutes and pickpockets slow gait than with the broader issues involved with these two professions and their location on city streets. If there are criminals working on a street, the law's first priority should be to round them up. The law's second priority (or probably much lower even than second) should be to make sure everyone is walking in the correct lane, which brings us to enforcement. 2. Enforcement If you watch the cited Youtube video, you'll notice that it takes two dedicated "city workers" to explain the new system to tourists and New Yorkers. [2] Tourists are by definition new to a city and its rules or customs, so they will need this explanation, even if the lines have been there for quite some time. Even if lines were on all city streets worldwide, non-urbanite tourists would still be unaware of the rules. In addition, there will be a propensity to break the rules knowingly. Tourists, once done sightseeing, will want to pick up the pace and "act like locals," so they will enter the fast-lane, but still might walk slower than local norms. Housewives and college students will want to make use of the business-people's special lane as well and will need to be kept out. Police are already over-stretched doing other work. My friend in San Francisco recently reported to the police that someone broke into his car, from a parking lot with a camera, and still was told by the police that they were so busy with murders and other more serious offenses that they did not have time to do much investigating. Theft/drug offenses/murders/rapes etc will obviously take priority over enforcing sidewalk lanes. On top of that, it's not even enforceable. Not all business-people have business cards, so it is hard to prove to a policeman that you are actually a business-person. If this is the enforcement mechanism, it's unfair to anyone whose business cannot afford business cards for him or her, especially the struggling self-employed entrepreneur (or writer). My opponent's own Evening Standard article cites the infeasibility of the project as far as enforcement. "Locals welcomed the idea in principle but said they could not see how it would be enforced. . . . ‘In principle it seems like a good idea but in practice how would it be policed - would there be a central reservation?' Richard Huntington, director of strategy at advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, based in Charlotte Street, said: ‘A real dual carriage-way is governed by the Highway Code. It is a bit strange to think there could be a pedestrian Highway Code. It feels a bit like institutional wishful thinking to me.'" And it's easier to enforce a law that many see as fair "this lane for non-tourists" than one people see as unfair "this lane for business-people only." Once the norms of a society become to break a given rule, the rule might as well not exist. If you go to any major city in a country where the norm is to jaywalk, the pedestrian lights might as well not exist. The same would be true of the sidewalk lanes as soon as people realize they are unenforceable, which brings us to the issue of cost (why pay for the unenforceable). 3. Cost The reason the Oxford Street project makes sense is its limited scope. It becomes enforceable because it takes fewer resources to enforce it in only one area. It becomes cost-effective because it is implemented only in areas where there is a great deal of both resident foot-traffic and tourist-foot traffic. Drawing lines on streets that see very few pedestrians makes little sense. These programs work when targeting specific streets only. For example, the financial district in San Francisco does not see a whole lot of tourist traffic, since it is not a tourist hot spot, unlike the Wharf or Chinatown. Drawing lines there, when most streets are used solely by business-people, does not merit the cost. San Jose is a city, but one where tourists rarely visit. It's downtown does not need pedestrian lines. Even in major metropolitan tourist-trap cities, drawing lines in the residential areas is a waste of money. 4. Practical objection Look at the picture of Oxford Street in the article my opponent cited. It's nearly twice the width of a typical city sidewalk. You'll notice something else: people are walking in two directions. Another challenge with sidewalk walking (and speed) is that people use each sidewalk as a two-way street. People typically walk on their right side, so there are no head on collisions. Narrow sidewalks do not allow 2 two-way traffic flows, one for the business-people lane and one for the non-business-people lane. There's simply not enough room for 4 lanes. Narrow streets will be slowed to a crawl when there are "traffic jams" between people going one way and people going the other, within each lane. Imagine getting stuck in a narrow doorway, as a visual. A doorway is approximately half the width of a typical city street. This proves the Oxford Street project is unique in another way – sidewalk width. 5. SLOW DOWN A study published in The Age (Australia) found that people in urban areas are walking 10% faster than they were a decade ago. [3] The study finds that when we walk faster, it is because of the perception that we need to be in a hurry because we have something we desperately need to do. The attitude that we've adopted that forces us to walk faster and faster is killing us. Stress hormones are bad for the body in a number of ways, first and foremost in terms of causing heart disease. The same study "showed that people in fast-moving cities were less likely to help others, and had more heart disease than those in slower places." Saving three minutes a day by walking faster doesn't help if you shorten your life by 20 years with all the stress of constantly being in a hurry. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org... [2] Youtube, "improv everywhere the tourist lane" [3] http://www.theage.com.au...