A made for City Paper story if there ever was one...

Rules of the road: (1) No raking women with your eyes; glance quickly and respectfully. (2) Offer to share a taxi rather than fight over it. (3) Babies in strollers get right-of-way—until they abuse it. (4) Still no ogling girls—c’mon! (5) And skateboarding, are you kidding me? (6) Not everybody loves your dog as much as you do. (7) No bicycling on the sidewalk unless under the age of 6. (8) Pedestrians can die of secondhand smoke, too. (Photo: Photomontage by Peter Rad)

New York Magazine has a cover story on urban etiquette, "The Urban Etiquette Guide," like "Sex in the City," I don't "get" a lot of it... but there are some great images. From the article:

And these days, there are unprecedented opportunities for new offense: You’ve got interfaith-interracial partners, gay married couples with kids from a best friend–cum–surrogate, friends in ridiculously disparate income brackets, threesomes, twosomes with an “understanding.” Who walks the bride down the aisle—especially when there are two brides? (Anyone she damn well pleases, most likely.) And what does the polite guest bring to an “I’m Divorced!” party? (First, find out who got possession of the good crystal.) How do you react when someone introduces a colleague to you as “my lover”? (Step one: Do not spit out drink.)

And that’s just the beginning—in a new era, age-old questions become vexing all over again. As a city of early adopters, New York has embraced countless communication-facilitating services and gadgets, which have simultaneously brought us closer together and pushed us further apart. On the one hand, technology is the great equalizer; on the other, it’s created brand-new sticky situations. We expand our social networks via Friendster and MySpace but often end up with an unmanageable list of mere acquaintances or even strangers. We can feel like we know someone intimately whom we’ve never met while never speaking to the person who’s worked down the hallway

The New Rules For Getting Along
Love & Sex
David Cross on How Not to Alienate a Celebrity
The Office
Cell Phones & iPods
City Living
Subway & Cabs
Family
Dining
Friends
Amy Poehler's 8 Rules for Being a Civilized New Yorker

Rules of the underground: (1) Knees may be no more than six inches apart. (2) If you can't control your offspring, watch as a stranger does it for you. (3) What did we say about checking out the girls? (4) The Post is only 25 cents—buy your own. (5) Holding the subway door makes everyone on the train love you. (6) As does loud music. (7) Lie down on subway only if dead. (Photo: Photomontage by Peter Rad)

All the more reason to love NYC.

Index Keywords: urban-living