There is an epidemic afflicting NYU’s student body that I can no longer ignore in good conscience. While in a rush to class, with five minutes to get from Third Avenue North to Bobst Library, every time, without fail, I get stuck behind a gaggle of slow walkers.

Some days it’s tourists in matching t-shirts ambling down Broadway, and other times it’s a pack of incapacitated doomscrollers congregating outside the Kimmel Center for University Life. Last Friday, I found myself trailing a dogwalker taking half of Manhattan’s pugs and poodles for a stroll in Washington Square Park. I am sick of having to overtake people learning to use their legs for the first time, and dropping an “excuse me” every five seconds. My sneakers are coming home increasingly muddied after veering off road, trudging through tree pits and ominous smelling puddles to outpace the stragglers.

If you’re like me and are one game of sidewalk Tetris away from kicking someone in the shin, then fear no more. After much struggle, contemplation and headache, I have come to a fitting solution: air horns.

Drivers on the road can honk whenever they so wish — although admittedly a bit too often here in New York City — so why shouldn’t pedestrians have that luxury? If road rage is allowed to dominate the city’s soundscape, so should sidewalk rage. It would be a perfectly efficient way to call out slow walkers for what they are, without having to say a single word.

According to our official, empirically backed survey, 67% of NYU students say they’re “for the streets.” However, two out of three walk at snail speed. The numbers aren’t adding up. Are you really for the streets if you can’t walk as fast as a car?

Out of the three students surveyed, we all said that slow walking is a major problem.

That is why today, I am calling for an ambitious project to be undertaken by the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service in collaboration with the Tandon School of Engineering to distribute 60,000 high-tech violet airhorns, finally working on a problem worth solving. As the world’s foremost school for public policy, Wagner is a perfect fit for this pressing issue. With the recent appointment of Dean Polly Trottenburg, who obviously knows a thing or two about transportation, NYU not only has the capacity to champion my cause, but can deliver the next great innovation in mobility since running — or Strava. There is no bastion of innovation better suited to ignore the institutional rhetoric that perpetrates the myth that slow walkers have an equal right to the sidewalk.

Using blasts of compressed air to annihilate the diamond shaped clusters that stand in our way, product simulations estimate the walk to class would be cut in half.

I fully expect mayoral frontrunners Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo to campaign on this universally popular proposal — experts say that the politician who embraces walk-maxxing will surge in the polls. Recent mayoral goals are in line with expediting the commute to work and class. While free buses could help some people, we all know that real New Yorkers walk faster than buses.

Us fast walkers don’t deserve to be held back any longer. One of our beloved city’s defining characteristics is its fast pace — we cannot afford to have our reputation eaten away at. School administration should put an end to what has become an epidemic by implementing this system of public shaming. Let’s be the leaders on this. If speedwalkers are the heartbeat of New York City, slow walkers are the dagger in its side.

Nonetheless, I don’t want my position to be confused: I’m not a radical walkist. My movement only targets disrespectful slow walkers. The type that amble leisurely and walk single-file to stay in their lane — literally and metaphorically — are tolerable. I understand that not everybody is a bona fide walk-maxxer who averages three blocks per minute. However, it’s those that bumble aimlessly through the streets leading a conga line of chaos that are the targets of my revolution. To join the frontier of this fight, you can check out my club, the roadkillers — dedicated to the eradication of the recreational stroll.

Contact Joel Smith at [email protected].