A walking manifesto
And how lucky I am to find being stuck in traffic a novel experience
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This week, my husband and I went to Louisville for lunch and some holiday shopping (which for us, is groceries and booze). We found ourselves ever so briefly in one of those longish lines of traffic in a big, multiplex shopping center. Seriously, we were there maybe five minutes, which isn’t long, but is always a novel experience for us, almost like an adventure. We looked around at all the cars and at each other. “This is some people’s whole lives,” I said. “Sitting in a car in traffic.”
Once, we were walking home from the coffee shop and bumped into a couple of friends. “Such a lovely day for a walk,” one friend said. “Oh, they walk in all the weather,” the other friend said, which is true.
When we visited St. Louis a couple of years ago, we asked the bartender at the brewpub we’d walked to (which we could tell from the looks we got had already made us weird) how far it was to walk to a park. He blinked at us in shock. “I have no idea,” he said. “You could get an Uber, though.”
This is all to say that my husband and I are walkers. Evangelically so, you might say. We once walked from the tip of Manhattan all the way to Central Park, which is nothing for a lot of New Yorkers, but shocking to most Midwestern sensibilities. We don’t like vacationing in places that aren’t walkable. If we can’t ditch a car, what’s the point?
We are spoiled like that. We are like unicorns in that we live in a place that is small, rural and also infinitely walkable. There are not many places like this in the United States. Hell, Madison is more walkable than a lot of U.S. cities.1
In downtown Madison, I can walk to my dentist. My therapist. Sometimes, to my doctor’s appointment (it depends on which doctor). To the farmer’s market. To get a few groceries. To the library, which is where I’m walking most of the time you see me on the street. To a bookstore. To get my hair cut. To a decent bar. To see a concert or a movie. To visit most of my friends. From downtown Madison, I can walk to another state if I want to and visit the Dairy Queen while I’m there.
If I was feeling very ambitious, I could walk from downtown Madison up onto the Hilltop, which is where the Wal-Mart and the Kroger and all those suburban-ish things are, but I probably wouldn’t, because no one walks up there. Sidewalks are few and far between.
I could go on and on about how living in a walkable place contributes to your quality of life and a better world more generally. Walking is carbon neutral, so there are all the environmental benefits there. Even small walks have big benefits to our physical and mental health.
Walking makes us happier and driving just….doesn’t. Podcasts and audiobooks are lovely and certainly make spending a lot of time in your car more tolerable than it was in the past. But one of the single biggest predictors of happiness is the length of your commute. It’s just a simple fact that for most of us, the more time you spend in your car, the less happy you are. During the breaks when I’m not getting in my car to drive to campus (a whopping 15-minute commute), my car doesn’t move for weeks at a time. Yes, this makes me happy.
Sociologist Georg Simmel came up with the idea of the tragedy of culture to describe the way in which the things we create in society eventually come to control us. Cars are pretty good examples. They’re supposed to bring us freedom and they sort of do. But they also demand a lot of us: that we pay for insurance and taxes; that we keep them running and (maybe) clean; that we build roads and roads and more roads so we can drive them wherever we want as fast as possible; taxes to build those roads; taxes to maintain those roads; taxes to expand those roads to fit more cares; parking lots so we have someplace to put our cars; taxes or fees to pay for that parking; and on and on. Golf carts aren’t much different. They make their own set of demands.
You know what doesn’t require much of you beyond a comfortable pair of shoes and maybe a warm coat? Your feet.
Walking to get somewhere is not at all the same as driving (or, sorry, using a golfcart). The way we encounter the world when we’re walking is fundamentally different. Think about the things you yell at your fellow drivers when you’re in your car (I know that’s not just me). A car is a thick barrier between you and the rest of the world. We love the isolation that comes from being in a car and you can extol the virtues of introversion and misanthropy all you want, but there’s no denying that connection and belonging are essential to our survival. It’s pretty hard to feel connected to anyone when you’re sitting in a car stuck in traffic.
When you’re walking, you’re open to the world in a way that doesn’t happen in a car. You’re open to the elements in the form of wind or rain or cold. To the views, the line of the buildings on Main Street or the curve of the hill across the river. You’re open to the flock of sparrows flitting in that tree by the sidewalk. In a car or a golfcart, you’d never see the little orange cat that’s always in the window on Jefferson Street, rapt with attention as she watches the squirrel, tucked like a fat ball on the tree branch. You wouldn’t be able to wave hello to her, which I do every time and for every cat I see when I’m walking.
When you’re on a walk, you’re open to the faces of the people around you because in Madison, there’s almost always someone else walking. Well, okay, sometimes early on Saturday mornings the streets are pretty empty. Almost every other time of day or weather, people in Madison are walking from one place to another and this is such a miracle.
When you’re walking, you’re open to the chance encounter. It’s not impossible to stop for a chat in your car, but it’s a hell of a lot harder. When I’m lonely or restless, I go for a walk. It’s highly likely I’ll run into someone I know.
I’m a firm believer that you can’t really know a place until you’ve walked it. And still, we’ve made so many of our places unwalkable and, therefore, mostly unknowable. Dislocated from any human scale. Places to be known only in brief glances while moving at high speed through them and beyond them.
Sometimes my husband and I think about moving someplace else. A city, maybe. Louisville, even, which is a great town. But if we lived in one of the most walkable areas of Louisville, we’d still spend a lot of time driving. We’d still spend a greater portion of our lives sitting in our car like we did last week. And instead of being a novel experience, it’d be part of our everyday lives. Just another day.
Yeah, no, I don’t think so. Anyway, I’ve got a book on hold at the library to pick up, so I’m suiting up in the cold and heading out. Maybe I’ll see that cat.
I’d like to claim that in my infinite wisdom, I chose to live in Madison because of it’s walkability. I didn’t. I lucked out, though maybe there was some intuitive intelligence at work. I’m a sociologist, so I understand that structure and behavior are strongly related. If you don’t live in a place that is designed to be walkable, walking is really hard. You know this if you’ve ever tried walking in a place that’s clearly not designed for it, like along one of those suburban strip malls. Even if they have put sidewalks in, no one is using them and everything about the place screams, “This place is for cars!” On one of those walks in St. Louis, there were sidewalks, but you could feel that no besides homeless people ever used them. Walking in places not meant for walking feels dangerous. This is why I feel very lucky to live in Madison, which is both structurally conducive to walking and a place with a culture of walking. But this doesn’t mean everyone here takes advantage of it. The idea that walking as a form of transportation is annoying or too slow or inefficient is strong in American culture. Hence, golf carts.