There are skills and habits you acquire when you live in New York. Like standing by the subway doors instead of the middle of the train (or its variant, getting out of the station and standing lost right at the top of the stairs). And then there is the all-important walking through the crowd.

14 Street Union Square is perhaps the busiest station I use – it has multiple lines railing through it. I’ve been using it since junior high, and while it has gone through some cosmetic changes, the swarm of people shuffling through has always been chaotic. One of the skills you need is a technique from aerodynamics called drafting. In science speak, it’s a way of “reducing the overall effect of drag or air resistance due to exploiting the lead object’s slipstream.” In language I can get behind, drafting is when an object uses another object in front of it to go faster. Race cars use this maneuver though it’s not confined to vehicles.



You may not have realized it but if you’re the type of walker who needs to get from point A to point B in the fastest time possible, you most likely do some drafting. Any pedestrian-heavy part of the city, there will always be waves of people crashing into other waves. Sometimes the fastest way through the crowd is to crash your way through, and the most efficient way to do so is to ride the wake made by the person already parting the sea.

There are two kinds of drafting: there is competitive drafting where the trailer exploits the lead so that eventually the lead is overtaken; and there is cooperative drafting where the lead sets up the rest of the group to go faster without expending more energy.

Does this technique exist in the online space? Is linking a form of drafting, in that, a link will take you straight to a destination without having to wade through irrelevant pages, sites, and searches? What about instances of two sites linking to each other? Or does instantaneous travel negate drafting?

How about social networking tools like Facebook? You search for high school mates, friend them up, and then wow what a coincidence, an old crush you haven’t seen since your acne days just happens to be on their friends list. At this point it would be rude not to say hi, how are you, how has life been treating would you like to get a drink sometime?

Actually, there is another name for hiding in the bushes.

Something To Think About: I imagine the 80/20 Principle is kinda like drafting.