It drives me insane the same way that tourists stopping in the middle of the sidewalk to look at a map does, or when people walk 4-people wide, stand on the left of an escalator, queue up for a bus by blocking the sidewalk, or holding everyone up to 'just take a quick photo.'

It's really annoying, but I don't think you can just ad-hoc legislate it. We have tons of things that were made illegal in NYC and a tiny amount of the laws actually get enforced. As others have said, this can lead to laws only being enforced on people the police already want to harass, and everyone else doing it on a regular basis.

In addition, with our Vision Zero goals, there are so many other things to focus enforcement and government bandwidth on. Hundreds of people are still being killed by reckless drivers every year. If we can solve that, then we can focus on getting people to be less annoying when walking around.