Pedestrian Paradise

By Jay Walljasper, Utne. Posted April 30, 2004.

One of the local characters in the small city where I grew up was Judge Green. A giant man, 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 he had one trait that made him seem a bit peculiar: He walked to work every day. If you drove down Broadway Avenue at certain hours, you couldn't miss his towering figure 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 day 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 some time at a party or other gathering: Announce that you are walking home. I'll bet you, two-to-one odds, that someone will offer a ride, even if you live just three blocks away and it's a sunny 80 degrees outside. This is a generous gesture, of course, seen by most folks as similar to giving a glass of water to someone who says they're thirsty. Why walk if you could go in a car?

But the answer to that question is becoming more complicated than it used to be. The net effect of two hundred and fifty 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.

Our decision to drive made over and over again, has eliminated the option to walk in many places. Many kids, old people, poor people, and disabled people are living under a form of house arrest, unable to go anywhere without finding someone to chauffeur them. Sidewalks are seen as an unnecessary luxury in most suburbs, and 60 years of traffic "improvements" on America's streets have rendered many other communities unfit for pedestrians. The simplest human acts -- buying groceries, going to school, visiting friends -- now depend upon climbing into a car. People today even drive somewhere to take a walk because the streets around their homes feel inhospitable.

Yet one thing has changed for the better since I was a kid in the days of cheap gas, open roads, and plentiful parking. Increasing numbers of Americans -- seeing a future of traffic jams, soulless sprawl, and never-ending wars for oil -- are looking for ways to get out of the driver's seat. Even at a time when politicians in Washington are allocating billions for another round of mega-highway construction and pop culture celebrates the sexy supremacy of Hummer drivers, there is an emerging movement to reclaim our right to take a walk.

All across the land, people are speaking up, organizing meetings, fighting city hall and, in some cases, working with city hall to make streets safer and more pleasant for pedestrians. They've gotten crosswalks painted in some places, streets narrowed in others, stop signs and speed bumps installed, zoning ordinances changed to promote pedestrian-friendly development, and plans created to help kids walk or bike to school.

These issues reach deep into the heart of people's lives. Two neighbors bump into one another on the sidewalk and start talking about planting more flowers along the street, turning an empty storefront into a coffee shop or lobbying the city council to add bike lanes to that busy road. In small but important ways, these people are changing the face of America block by block.

This is a classic grassroots movement, with no clearly identifiable leaders. But a number of the people most active in the cause have been inspired by a former seminary student, magazine editor and window washer from Brisbane, Australia named David Engwicht. Marked-up copies of Engwicht's books, Reclaiming Our Cities and Towns and Street Reclaiming (both New Society Publishers), are passed from hand to hand at community meetings and potlucks across North America.

Engwicht's message is as simple as it radical. For nearly all of human history, he declares, streets belonged to everybody. Kids played there, dogs slept there, people stopped there to flirt or gossip. But over recent decades, beginning in Detroit and spreading over much of the world, streets have been seized for the exclusive use of cars and trucks. Most communities have never recovered from this theft. Deprived of our neighborhood gathering spots, we've retreated to the backyard or indoors to avoid the noise, smell and danger of speeding traffic. In the process, we've withdrawn from one another.

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