Why No One Walks
By Bill Bryson (Monday, 8 March 1999)
I’ll tell you this, but you’ll have to promise that it will go no further. Not long after we moved here we had the people next door round for dinner and – I swear this is true—
I was astounded (I recall asking them jokingly if they used a light aircraft to get to the supermarket, which simply drew blank looks and the mental scratching of my name from all future invitation lists), but I have since come to realize that there was nothing especially odd in their driving less than a couple of hundred feet to visit us. Nobody walks anywhere in America nowadays.
A researcher at the University of California at Berkeley recently made a study of the nation's walking habits and found that the average person in the United States walks less than 75 miles a year -- about 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day. I'm no stranger to sloth myself, but that's appallingly little. I rack up more mileage than that just looking for the channel changer.
Eighty-five percent of us, according to the Berkeley study, are "essentially" sedentary and 35 percent are "totally" sedentary. We have become a nation of sitters and riders.
One of the things my wife and I wanted when we decided to move back to America was to live in a manageably sized town within walking distance of a central business district. Hanover, where we settled, is a small, typical New England town, pleasant, sedate, and compact. It has a broad central green surrounded by the venerable buildings of Dartmouth College, a trim Main Street, and leafy residential streets. It is, in short, an agreeable, easy place to go about one's business on foot, and yet as far as I can tell almost no one does.
I walk to town nearly every day when I am at home. I go to the post office or library or bookstore, and sometimes, if I am feeling particularly debonair, I stop at Rosey Jekes Cafe for a cappuccino. Occasionally in the evenings my wife and I stroll up to the Nugget Theater for a movie or to Murphy's for a beer. All this is a big part of my life and I wouldn't dream of doing it other than on foot. People have gotten used to this curious and eccentric behavior now, but several times in the early days passing acquaintances would slow by the curb and ask if I needed a ride.
"But I'm going your way," they would insist when I politely declined. "Really, it's no bother."
"Honestly, I enjoy walking."
"Well, if you're absolutely sure ," they would say and depart reluctantly, even guiltily, as if leaving the scene of an accident without giving their name.
People have become so habituated to using the car for everything that it would never occur to them to unfurl their legs and see what those lower limbs can do. It is worth noting that 93 percent of all trips outside the property in the United States now involve the use of a car.
As with most old New England towns designed for another age of transportation, Hanover isn't a particularly obliging place for cars. Nearly any visit to town by automobile will be characterized by a long and exasperating hunt for a parking
place. To alleviate this, the local authorities are forever widening roads to speed traffic flow and building new parking lots -- Dartmouth recently tore down an unexceptional old hospital building in order to insert into the heart of the campus a couple of more acres of numbingly soulless parking lot -- failing to understand that it is the absence of these features that makes the town desirable in the first place.
But it isn't really the authorities who are to blame. It is the people who wish to take two tons of metal with them wherever they go. We have reached an age where college students expect to drive between classes, where parents will get in a car and drive three blocks to pick up their children from a friend's house, where the mailman takes his van up and down every driveway on a street. We will go through the most extraordinary contortions to save ourselves 20 feet of walking.
Sometimes it's almost ludicrous. The other day I was in the little nearby town of Etna waiting to bring home one of my children from a piano lesson when a car stopped outside the local post office and a man about my age popped out and dashed inside the store (and left the engine running -- something else that exercises me inordinately). He was inside for about three to four minutes, then came out, got in the car, and drove exactly 16 feet (I had nothing better to do so I paced it off) to the general store next door, and popped in again, engine still running.
And the thing is, this man looked really fit. I'm sure he jogs extravagant distances and plays squash and does all kinds of exuberantly healthful things, but I am just as sure that he drives to each of these undertakings. It's crazy. An acquaintance of ours was complaining the other day about the difficulty of finding a place to park outside the local gymnasium. She goes there several times a week to walk on a treadmill. The gymnasium is, at most, a six-minute walk from her front door. I asked her why she didn't walk to the gym and do six minutes less on the treadmill.
She looked at me as if I were tragically simple-minded and said, "But I have a program for the treadmill. It records my distance and speed and calorie-burn rate, and I can adjust for degree of difficulty." It had not occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard.
According to a concerned and faintly horrified recent editorial in the Boston Globe, the United States spends less than 1 percent of its $25 billion-a-year highway budget on facilities for pedestrians. Actually, I'm surprised it's that much. Go to almost any suburb developed in the last 30 years and you will not find a sidewalk anywhere. Often you won't find a single pedestrian crossing.
I had this brought home to me last summer when we were driving across Maine and stopped for coffee on Route 1 in one of those endless zones of shopping malls, motels, gas stations, and fast food places that sprout everywhere these days. I noticed there was a bookstore across the street, so I decided to skip coffee and pop over. I needed a particular book for some work I was doing and anyway I figured this would give my wife a chance to spend some important quality time with four restive, overheated children.
Although the bookshop was no more than seventy or eighty feet away, I discovered that there was no way to get there on foot. There was a traffic outlet for cars, but no provision for pedestrians, and no way to cross on foot without dodging over six lanes of swiftly moving traffic. In the end, I had to get in our car and drive across. There was simply no other way. At the time it seemed ridiculous and exasperating, but afterward I realized that I was possibly the only person ever even to have entertained the notion of negotiating that intersection on foot.
The fact is, we not only don't walk anywhere anymore in this country, we won't walk anywhere, and woe to anyone who tries to make us, as a town here in New Hampshire called Laconia discovered to its cost. A few years ago, Laconia spent $5 million pedestrianizing its downtown, to make it a pleasant shopping environment. Esthetically it was a triumph -- urban planners came from all over the country to coo and take photos -- but commercially it was a disaster. Forced to walk one whole block from a parking lot, shoppers abandoned downtown Laconia for suburban malls.
In 1994, Laconia dug up its pretty brick paving, took away the benches, tubs of geraniums, and decorative trees, and put the street back to the way it had been in the first place. Now people can park right in front of the stores again, and downtown Laconia thrives anew.
And if that isn't sad, I don't know what is.
Copyright © 2002 by Bill Bryson. Excerpted from the book I'm A Stranger Here Myself, published by Broadway Books, a division of Random House Inc. Reprinted with permission.
Why No One Walks By Bill Bryson (Monday, 8 March 1999)I’ll tell you this, but you’ll have to promise that it will go no further. Not long after we moved here we had the people next door round for dinner and – I swear this is true—I was astounded (I recall asking them jokingly if they used a light aircraft to get to the supermarket, which simply drew blank looks and the mental scratching of my name from all future invitation lists), but I have since come to realize that there was nothing especially odd in their driving less than a couple of hundred feet to visit us. Nobody walks anywhere in America nowadays.A researcher at the University of California at Berkeley recently made a study of the nation's walking habits and found that the average person in the United States walks less than 75 miles a year -- about 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day. I'm no stranger to sloth myself, but that's appallingly little. I rack up more mileage than that just looking for the channel changer.Eighty-five percent of us, according to the Berkeley study, are "essentially" sedentary and 35 percent are "totally" sedentary. We have become a nation of sitters and riders.One of the things my wife and I wanted when we decided to move back to America was to live in a manageably sized town within walking distance of a central business district. Hanover, where we settled, is a small, typical New England town, pleasant, sedate, and compact. It has a broad central green surrounded by the venerable buildings of Dartmouth College, a trim Main Street, and leafy residential streets. It is, in short, an agreeable, easy place to go about one's business on foot, and yet as far as I can tell almost no one does.I walk to town nearly every day when I am at home. I go to the post office or library or bookstore, and sometimes, if I am feeling particularly debonair, I stop at Rosey Jekes Cafe for a cappuccino. Occasionally in the evenings my wife and I stroll up to the Nugget Theater for a movie or to Murphy's for a beer. All this is a big part of my life and I wouldn't dream of doing it other than on foot. People have gotten used to this curious and eccentric behavior now, but several times in the early days passing acquaintances would slow by the curb and ask if I needed a ride."But I'm going your way," they would insist when I politely declined. "Really, it's no bother.""Honestly, I enjoy walking.""Well, if you're absolutely sure ," they would say and depart reluctantly, even guiltily, as if leaving the scene of an accident without giving their name.People have become so habituated to using the car for everything that it would never occur to them to unfurl their legs and see what those lower limbs can do. It is worth noting that 93 percent of all trips outside the property in the United States now involve the use of a car.As with most old New England towns designed for another age of transportation, Hanover isn't a particularly obliging place for cars. Nearly any visit to town by automobile will be characterized by a long and exasperating hunt for a parkingplace. To alleviate this, the local authorities are forever widening roads to speed traffic flow and building new parking lots -- Dartmouth recently tore down an unexceptional old hospital building in order to insert into the heart of the campus a couple of more acres of numbingly soulless parking lot -- failing to understand that it is the absence of these features that makes the town desirable in the first place.But it isn't really the authorities who are to blame. It is the people who wish to take two tons of metal with them wherever they go. We have reached an age where college students expect to drive between classes, where parents will get in a car and drive three blocks to pick up their children from a friend's house, where the mailman takes his van up and down every driveway on a street. We will go through the most extraordinary contortions to save ourselves 20 feet of walking.Sometimes it's almost ludicrous. The other day I was in the little nearby town of Etna waiting to bring home one of my children from a piano lesson when a car stopped outside the local post office and a man about my age popped out and dashed inside the store (and left the engine running -- something else that exercises me inordinately). He was inside for about three to four minutes, then came out, got in the car, and drove exactly 16 feet (I had nothing better to do so I paced it off) to the general store next door, and popped in again, engine still running.And the thing is, this man looked really fit. I'm sure he jogs extravagant distances and plays squash and does all kinds of exuberantly healthful things, but I am just as sure that he drives to each of these undertakings. It's crazy. An acquaintance of ours was complaining the other day about the difficulty of finding a place to park outside the local gymnasium. She goes there several times a week to walk on a treadmill. The gymnasium is, at most, a six-minute walk from her front door. I asked her why she didn't walk to the gym and do six minutes less on the treadmill.She looked at me as if I were tragically simple-minded and said, "But I have a program for the treadmill. It records my distance and speed and calorie-burn rate, and I can adjust for degree of difficulty." It had not occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard.According to a concerned and faintly horrified recent editorial in the Boston Globe, the United States spends less than 1 percent of its $25 billion-a-year highway budget on facilities for pedestrians. Actually, I'm surprised it's that much. Go to almost any suburb developed in the last 30 years and you will not find a sidewalk anywhere. Often you won't find a single pedestrian crossing.
I had this brought home to me last summer when we were driving across Maine and stopped for coffee on Route 1 in one of those endless zones of shopping malls, motels, gas stations, and fast food places that sprout everywhere these days. I noticed there was a bookstore across the street, so I decided to skip coffee and pop over. I needed a particular book for some work I was doing and anyway I figured this would give my wife a chance to spend some important quality time with four restive, overheated children.
Although the bookshop was no more than seventy or eighty feet away, I discovered that there was no way to get there on foot. There was a traffic outlet for cars, but no provision for pedestrians, and no way to cross on foot without dodging over six lanes of swiftly moving traffic. In the end, I had to get in our car and drive across. There was simply no other way. At the time it seemed ridiculous and exasperating, but afterward I realized that I was possibly the only person ever even to have entertained the notion of negotiating that intersection on foot.
The fact is, we not only don't walk anywhere anymore in this country, we won't walk anywhere, and woe to anyone who tries to make us, as a town here in New Hampshire called Laconia discovered to its cost. A few years ago, Laconia spent $5 million pedestrianizing its downtown, to make it a pleasant shopping environment. Esthetically it was a triumph -- urban planners came from all over the country to coo and take photos -- but commercially it was a disaster. Forced to walk one whole block from a parking lot, shoppers abandoned downtown Laconia for suburban malls.
In 1994, Laconia dug up its pretty brick paving, took away the benches, tubs of geraniums, and decorative trees, and put the street back to the way it had been in the first place. Now people can park right in front of the stores again, and downtown Laconia thrives anew.
And if that isn't sad, I don't know what is.
Copyright © 2002 by Bill Bryson. Excerpted from the book I'm A Stranger Here Myself, published by Broadway Books, a division of Random House Inc. Reprinted with permission.
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