Pedestrian Power

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

A new movement that's got legs

It might be going too far to say that pedestrians have bounced back from the brink of extinction. But it's certainly true that people's habit of walking almost disappeared in the 20th century beneath a rising tide of auto traffic. According to James Nolan, an American in Spain, the streets of Madrid are once again filled with people on foot. Even in the United States, where the car is king, a growing movement is reasserting citizens' right to take a walk. Utne editor Jay Walljasper chronicles this pedestrian uprising and discovers its secret weapon.
-- The Editors

One of the local characters in the small city where I grew up was Judge Green. A towering figure, probably 6 feet 7, he was widely admired around town, in part because he had been star of the only Urbana High School team ever to make it to the championship game of the Illinois state basketball tournament. I remember him as a cheerful man who greeted everyone with a smile. But there was one thing that made him seem a bit peculiar: He walked to work every day. If you drove down Broadway at certain hours, you couldn't miss him striding along the sidewalk.

One day, home from college and already an ardent environmentalist, I was walking uptown myself when it dawned on me that Judge Green's home was only a few blocks from the courthouse -- hardly more than half a mile. I was shocked. The man many folks thought eccentric (and I thought heroic) for not driving to work each morning was covering a distance that would be nothing to pedestrians in Europe, or most other places outside the United States. How sad, I sighed. There really is no hope that Americans will ever get out of their cars if a half-mile walk looks to them like an Olympic endurance event.

Walking, in many ways, is still viewed as an exotic and slightly odd habit. Try this experiment: Announce at a party or gathering that you are walking home. I'll bet you, two-to-one odds, that someone will offer a ride, even if you're going just three blocks and it's a sunny 80 degrees outside. This is a generous gesture, of course, seen by most folks as akin to giving a glass of water to someone who says they're thirsty. Why walk if you could ride?

The answer to that question, however, is more complicated than it used to be. The net effect of 250 million Americans always taking the car results in polluted skies, congested roads, global warming, burgeoning obesity, and a growing sense of isolation in most American communities.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print