An interesting example of how too much uniformity can weaken a system. Where i live, there is a low but "reliable" percentage of riders who are just too rude to follow the left/right protocol. They are rare enough that during low-traffic periods, chances are quite low that you will be blocked while taking the individual latency improvement of walking. However, in periods of high traffic there will be enough of of them to reliably break the throughput-limiting lane pattern and congestion propagation will make sure that it stays that way until the next break in throughput demand.

Never occurred to me that the occasional lane-blocker was an accidental optimization.