Science Shows How You Walk When You've Had One Too Many

Yesterday we wrote about scientists who were trying to learn the secrets of efficient traffic flows by watching the masters—ants. Now, researchers are trying to figure out the traffic flows of a much less organized group—drunks. Simon Moore from the University of Cardiff in the U.K. wanted to find the math behind the stumbling and weaving of a drunkard's gait. So he and his team spent nights in the center of the Welsh capital, studying how people in varying states of inebriation stagger around. They then created a moving model from their data, which you can watch here. To nobody's surprise, a drunken crowd gets jumbled up and can't get where it's going as quickly. With half of the people in a crowd highly intoxicated, Moore says, the group's progress slows by 9 percent. When everybody's hammered, a group travels 38 percent more slowly than normal. The researchers say they performed the study not only out of curiosity—because to their knowledge no one had studied the traffic flow of drunken pedestrians—but also out of concern for safety: Drunks get in the way and delay other people, Moore says, making them targets of aggression. Moore's study is yet another argument for wider sidewalks: Let all pedestrians, drunk or sober, move at their own pace. Would you rather everyone drove home? Image: iStockphoto