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walking
Hitting the open road...with your sneakers (or, if you’re in LA, flip flops). Photograph: Jason Rosenberg/flickr
Hitting the open road...with your sneakers (or, if you’re in LA, flip flops). Photograph: Jason Rosenberg/flickr

Even the most car-centric city holds joys for pedestrians ... if you seek them out

This article is more than 9 years old

Nothing can compare with a stroll, even when sidewalks are deserted and automotive traffic hums all around you

Walking through most American cities can be a desolating experience. Few are made for people like me, the pedestrian, who choose strolling and observing over cruising fast through constructed landscapes. Yet, there’s a perverse pleasure in walking through cities designed for cars; these supposed “open roads” weren’t made for us. Advertising’s promise of freedom is only granted to car owners. The emptiness in this exhaust-filled air is easily mistaken for openness, opportunity, possibility.

The walking state of mind is careless and free. The pedestrian has concerns other than the road. They can stop to acknowledge a person who lives on the street. There’s a chance to wave at someone who’s sitting on their porch. Catching a glimpse of items left behind, observing the lived state – weathered, graffitied – of street signs, understanding the landscapes that define place: these are the joys of walking.

The mind behind the wheel is always distracted. Pay attention to the road in front, watch the vehicles nearby, keep an eye on the color-changing lights, navigate that two-ton hunk of steel-and-moving-parts around others of its ilk. Steering a car is nothing like the natural physical coordination with one’s legs: its like an out of body experience – you float without any seeming effort, and life flashes before your eyes.

For the pedestrian, time is a slowly moving picture. Driving in a city made for cars is a cinematic experience – you watch, but you’re not part of the action. I was once riding in the passenger seat in my friend’s car in Nashville, Tennessee, rolling up hills and swerving down its bends, catching glimpses of an alarming number of both churches and adult entertainment stores. I was there, but I wasn’t.

In Los Angeles, another friend often gives me a ride home. We speed across a bridge that straddles either side of the Interstate 5. We admire the mountains looming in the distance, the reason that this place is filled with smog and, also, is so beautiful. This visual experience comes with an environmental price tag. It’s a picture best seen from the dashboard; I’ll never take that photo with my phone - that would too easily distill the experience. I will watch it approach and disappear, a moving picture.

It’s eerie walking in a non-walking suburban city when no one’s there. Tulsa is not a walking city but I didn’t have a car, so I traveled by foot from the Philbrook Museum to meet a friend for lunch. Roaming through what appeared to be a gated community filled with huge southern mansions, I waved hello to groundskeepers and gardeners. They were the only humans around.

As I exited the gates and turned left onto a Tulsa city sidewalk, I felt as if I was walking into oncoming traffic. Hummers, jeeps and vans sped at me. I tried looking at people in cars but they were paying attention to the road, trying to drive, which really means trying not to crash.

As I walked over a bridge, I realized that I was the only person on foot. I noticed bus stops but no one waited at them. I stopped and took a selfie in a reflective stop sign, and contemplated sending it to a friend to let them know something about where I was at that moment. Instead I saved it to my phone, proof of that time I walked in a place where everyone was there but no one else was present with me.

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