City walking tours: how to be heard over traffic without shouting

An open archaeological site gives you space and takes away shelter. A city street does the opposite: there is shelter everywhere, but no space, and the ground itself forces your group into the shape that works worst.

On a pavement thirty people become a line ten or fifteen metres long. The person at the far end is outside your voice before traffic is even considered.

Because of geometry, not volume. In the open you can gather a group into an arc two or three people deep, which keeps everyone within a few metres of you. A pavement gives you one dimension. The same thirty people stretch into a line, and the far end of that line is beyond hearing before a single car passes.

The second problem is that half your group ends up with their back to you, because a line has two ends and you can only face one.

Off the pavement, every time you can. Almost every city route has more options than guides use: a courtyard entrance, an arcade, a square, a building setback, the far side of a parked coach. Any of them converts your line back into a cluster and puts a physical object between the group and the road.

They are the same problem. A group straining to hear moves toward the guide, and on a street the guide is often standing closer to the kerb than anyone else. People step backwards into the road while looking at you.

When the group can hear comfortably, it stops compressing. That is the least-discussed safety benefit of headphone listening on city tours, and the one guides mention first after trying it.

It changes stop selection more than anything else. When everyone hears you regardless of where they stand, you can pick stops for sightlines and safety instead of for acoustics -- which on a city street are almost never the same place.

It also lets you keep talking while the group is moving between stops, which on a long street tour recovers a surprising amount of time. Walking commentary is impossible unaided; the front hears it and the back does not.

The stop-selection habits above work on any tour. If the thing limiting your city route is where your voice reaches rather than where the interesting things are, see how the broadcast works -- and compare it with hardware on the alternatives page.

Group-shape and stop-selection observations come from our own field tests. Photograph is our own. Local rules on amplification in public spaces vary by municipality; check with the relevant authority for your route.