Incivilities in public space

Here's an interesting list of 'incivilities related to different users sharing public spaces' (in order of the degree of annoyance they generate) -

• Cars badly parked
• Roller-bladers or cyclists that don’t pay attention to others
• Drivers of cars who don’t respect pedestrians and cyclists
• The use of cell-phones and Walkmans in public places
• Difficulty in moving around on the pavement with prams, strollers, caddies, suitcases, etc.
• Aggression between drivers
• People who are impolite, nervous or aggressive in public places
• People who throw out bits of paper or other rubbish on the street
• People who let their dogs to leave their mess just anywhere
• Lack of planning for the elderly or the handicapped.

This comes from an article on perceived environmental annoyances in urban settings, which just bumped into me. It's based on research in France, published in the Journal of environmental psychology, March 2007. In case you're wondering what happened to noise, it crops up elsewhere in the scale of seven dimensions which the researchers came up with, of which the above represents just one.