Pedestrian Paradise

This article is right on. With gas prices going up more should consider walking instead of driving where time is not an issue.

I've recently started a daily walking regimine because of health reasons. There's a dearth of sidewalks in my neighborhood. I guess I'm lucky there's not a whole lot of car traffic either.

By Jay Walljasper, Utne
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.

-more-

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18554

and a good experiment. 'course I live 10+ miles from nearest town, 5 to the nearest neighbor - though I have done that one horseback.

Hello from Germany,
I have to admit, I'm the most perverted individuum on this planet: I'm 40 years old, and I did never ever posess a car, I don't even have a driving licence - please don't liberate me!

I love nothing more than walking or using my bicycle.
I love technique, but cars are just too plain stupid for me.
It's even not about global warming or poluting, as a technology-freak, cars and individual traffic is just too stupid for me.
Just to use tons of metal and plastic to move 120 or less or more pounds of a single human being and giving that stupid human being the impression that he or she would move those tons is just too plain stupid for me.
I spend a lot of money on bicycles and use a cab, whenever I want one - I'm not dogmatic - and I have monthly tickets for public transfer. Some of my friends in Germany call me a snob, but I use not even half of the money they use for traffic and I have much more fun, and I will never ever visit a gym or do jogging.
Hello from Germany,
Dirk