The other day I was waiting for people to finish exiting an auditorium through a set of double doors so I could go in. It was nice and orderly, people were holding the door for the person behind them and no one was being shoved around. They were even walking on one side, but it wasn't out of convention to make room for people going the other direction.
Trying to maintain that spacing while the majority of people are exiting isn't worth it, for the same reason you let everyone off at a subway stop before the next group gets on. If there's two distinct flows where individual speed doesn't matter, cycling two directions is faster than splitting them.
No, they were on one side because only one side of the double doors had been opened, in alignment with the exit direction, and each person in the flow just followed the person before them.
If there's no rush, why bother diverging and pushing open another door when one is already conveniently held open?
I didn't have anything better to do, so I opened and held the other side of the double doors. The exiting flow of people noticed and adjusted to go through both sides, widening the bottleneck.
It probably saved me less than half a minute accounting for the number of people trying to exit.
Irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but I knew I had done what I could to speed it up and made a contribution to society, however minor.
If this happens to you, you don't have to hold the door. You could also open the door and go inside immediately. The crowd will figure out how to adjust.
On the whole, this doesn't matter.
However, I wanted to point out that you can hold the door, and that no one else did. It only takes one person to create the option for everyone else.
- Rew
Nightly Notes
Little to say today. Writing is as writing is, and this simply cannot be the highest priority in my life right now.
Tomorrow, perhaps?
- Rew