It's with a recent study by the British Council in mind (in some remote corner of the mind, at least) that your correspondent strolls the congested streets of lower Manhattan, pacing himself against his co-pedestrians, Berliner versus New Yorker. In their study, the Council timed -- presumably from afar -- street walkers in 32 cities traversing a busy, wide street uncrowded and obstacle-free, allowing the monitored urban ambler to "walk at their maximum speed" and cover a stretch of 20 yards (18.3m). I was please to hear about this, the scientific purity of their measurements, not the least following my endurance of the scores of matching T-shirted midwestern tourists blocking my every trajectory along the tributaries of Broadway on this blazing Saturday afternoon. New York's famed busybodies are, however, not the world's fastest. In fact, Germany's may be just a tad quicker.

Besides the suprising outcomes that Singapore (10.55s), Copenhagen (10.82s) and Madrid (10.89s) topped the list and the not-so-suprising news that the world is walking 10 percent faster than 10 years ago, your garden variety Berlin (#7) pedestrian outwalks the New Yorker (#8) by 44 seconds. Londoners (#12), one assumes the British Council was shocked to find, failed to break into the top 10 fastest metropoli. Quoth Samuel Johnson in a poem about London, "On all thy hours Security shall smile, and bless thine evening walk and morning toil".