Before anybody rushes to install signs telling pedestrians to walk on the left on bike paths, they should ride their bike around Capitol Park in Sacramento where pedestrian and bicycle traffic can be dense.

There, the pedestrians follow the commonly accepted convention that slower traffic keeps right and faster traffic passes on the left. It works well — better, in fact, than putting every pedestrian on a head-on collision course with every cyclist and letting them wonder who is going to move and in which direction.

Unlike a roadway where the motorist knows that the pedestrian either must stay to the side or step off the road, there are many places on Davis bike paths where it is not possible to leave the path. Consider this scenario in a location where there is no room to get off the path: A pedestrian is walking on the left facing a cyclist who is approaching him on the same side of the bike path. The cyclist sees other cyclists coming toward him and can’t move over. The pedestrian — misunderstanding why the cyclist isn’t moving over — is likely to step to his right out of the way of the oncoming cyclist and into the path of the cyclists coming up behind him.

Here’s another scenario: If I ring my bell to get the attention of a pedestrian walking toward me in the middle of the path, where does he go? Does he step to his right and out of my way or to his left and into my way?

The signage proposed by some readers would dictate that he steps left. Common sense would dictate otherwise.

Richard Haggstrom was right when he said walking on the left was dangerous advice. On a bike path a pedestrian is to a cyclist as a cyclist is to an automobile on the road. Please, don’t post signs trying to change a well-established convention that works.

Dianne Swann

Davis

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