Let's Take a Stroll

As a kid growing up in the fifties just outside Boston, I was a creature of asphalt. The sidewalk and stoop were my social hangouts, the hardtopped front and back courtyards of our Brookline apartment the place for play. "WATCH OUT FOR CARS!" was my grandparents' constant chorus and their warning rang true in our semi-urban surrounds. Still, my childhood was "foot-friendly," and walking a real option in that era.

Weekdays, our Oldsmobile stayed put in the parking lot behind our apartment while I walked to school. Accompanied by my father, whose walking genes I shared, we must have made an odd couple with our duck-waddling strides--me on my way to class, he heading off for commuter rail to Downtown. At day's end, crossing guards watched over me and my classmates as we headed home.

Newcomers to the Eisenhower-era highways and mindset, we needed such tutelage to survive the expanding car culture. "Song of Safety," a pictorial guide to staying out of automotive harm's way, first published in the thirties, instructed us on the dangers of traffic and of "Talking to the Driver"--the title of one of the songs.

In other respects, though, the car was still a pleasant pastime. The phrase pleasure drive had not yet become an oxymoron. "Come Away with Me Lucille in my Merry Oldsmobile" still lingered in our house, and "joyride" meant poky, relatively traffic-free Sunday trips here and there.

As we inched through adolescence, the streetcar and bus aided our foot-powered lives. Proximity and walkability let me meander from Sharaf's for "black cows" (root beer with one scoop of vanilla ice cream) to friends' houses. The trolley or bus that ran near our school shuttled me to piano lessons, or crosswise to art class, as it would my younger sister. Simultaneously, it liberated my mother and her generation to enjoy a far different lifestyle from that of today's chauffeur/soccer mom run ragged by her car-bound, six-trip-per-child days.

On reflection, it is those childhood experiences of freedom, combined with my profession as an architecture, planning, and environmental writer--not to mention my car-free life and the car-lite existence of my friends and colleagues--that have led to my conviction that we are not born with a gene that tells us to put the pedal to the metal.

At the same time, the congested reality of a nation in which cars outnumber licensed drivers has convinced me that what we really need to control our lethal, polluting chariots is a "Slow Foot" movement to shift the balance from horsepower to footpower and transfer the billions of dollars in federal road subsidies to alternate forms of transportation.

If we can have a Slow Food movement, why not a Slow Foot one?

The notion is a holistic one--a thousand cuts at the dominant mode of mobility. Like the movement among Europeans (and even some Americans) to go back to their gastronomical roots and encourage organic, home-stewarded nourishment as "an assertion of cultural identity," America's growing pedestrian movement means staying in touch with the lay of the land and slowing down in order to savor and save our built and natural environments.

Pedestrian advocacy is no fringe movement. A national poll taken in 2002 by the Surface Transportation Policy Project found that 55 percent of Americans want to walk more; 84 percent want streets designed for slower traffic; 59 percent support investing in public transit, and only a scant 25 percent want new roads. Like the advocates of Slow Food, the alliance of walkers and bikers, trainriders and public-transit users finds it necessary to make something that was once regarded as natural into a cause. The Center for Disease Control, in its own way, is also part of this effort, through its funding of the Safe Routes to School program, which encourage walking as an alternative to the sedentary, chauffeured--and obese--life of our sprawling suburbs.

Visits with my daughter in Paris provide a far happier picture of urban living. Strolling is a way of life in Paris because automobiles are pricey, parking is a disaster, gas is up to $5 a gallon, and pedestrian-friendly policies are in place, from wider sidewalks along the Champs-Elysee to a car-free summer route along the Seine. Even today, fewer than half of Parisian households own cars (and their drivers use them on only 13 percent of trips). With government support for small shops (malls, for example, must close on Sundays), and a brilliant public transportation system, the walking lifestyle flourishes.

In the United States, despite a few exceptions, the opposite holds sway. "A Walk on the Wild Side"--that was what a Washington Post Magazine writer recently called her adventures navigating 50 miles of commuter routes outside the capital, where she encountered "disappearing sidewalks, impassable crosswalks, unstoppable traffic, malevolent driving," and single ""ghost shoes" scattered mysteriously along the highways.

AmericaWalks, a coalition of 24 grassroots pedestrian organizations from Arizona to Wisconsin, its headquarters based in WalkBoston, insists that this picture can change. The group's philosophy is summed up in planner Peter Calthorpe's statement that "pedestrians are the lost measure of a community; they set the scale for both center and edge of our neighborhoods." The number of affiliates advocating pedestrian principles is growing, from Oakland's Baypeds to Hawaii's Na Kama Hele ("the Travelers"), to car-choked Atlanta's PEDS, they advocate pedestrian principles.

You don't have to be a walking wonk to appreciate the pedestrian advocates' tactics, from shrinking "neckdowns"--roadways narrowed by wider sidewalks--to traffic-taming rotaries; from signals timed for walkers to chaperones for youngsters who cling to a single rope on their Safe Routes to School. Add bicycle paths for cyclists, pedestrian bridges, and the toolkit for "traffic-calming" grows. Take the next step--to planning denser neighborhoods that encourage walkable main streets and public transit-oriented development--and the pedestrian possibilities mount.

A decade ago, I began work on my book, Asphalt Nation, by visiting so-called New Start streetcar (or light rail lines) in Portland, Oregon, (the poster child of rail), San Diego, and St. Louis. Today even western motowns are laying new lines: Dallas citizens have voted to bond new streetcars; sprawling Phoenix is planning for rail in 2008, And even Salt Lake City and rugged Denver have joined the list. Add to these a host of other car-free options, from rentable pay-per-hour services like "Zipcars," which allow members to pay a yearly fee and then hourly rates for off-and-on use, to so-called location-efficient mortgages in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Seattle, and let the public imagination soar.

It may seem strange to insist on all this inch-by-inch, row-by-row work to simply reinforce the most natural of motions of our bi-pedal, biologically itinerant species. But it is essential. In her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit quotes Rousseau on the intimacy of thought and movement: "I can only meditate when I am walking." Yet planning for pedestrians is about survival as well as meditation.

Consider the pleasures of your own mobility on foot, your own tactile, visual and emotional link to the walking journey, slow enough to let you absorb wind and weather and the lay of the land. Add the lengthening of your "footsteps" by communities that allow biking or create bikepaths. Launch your own freedom of motion, here and there, in the outdoors, in the city, and the country. And remember that a long global eco-journey begins with a single footstep.

Jane Holtz Kay is author of Asphalt Nation, Preserving New England and Lost Boston. For more on the subject see www.janeholtzkay.com.

Return to Top