pe - des - tri - an
–noun
1. a person who goes or travels on foot; walker.
Being a pedestrian in Southeastern Michigan is tough. The act of walking is so unusual that walkers are invisible. Just as you never see kids playing in yards, you rarely see anyone walking unless they’re doing it for health and exercise.
Perhaps it’s the auto industry that has made people unused to walking. With everyone and their uncle directly or indirectly related to a car company where employee discounts are deep, people take cars and driving for granted. If you live here, you have to drive here. Everything is spaced out so far, it’s a necessity.
In the Detroit area, mass transit is a joke (we call the SMART – Southeast Michigan Area Rapid Transit — bus the “dumb” bus), where buses seldom run on time if at all. It’s not San Francisco, New York or the Twin Cities where mass transit is reliable; it’s not even Colorado Springs, where one can still get from a southern suburb to downtown with ease. Still, people wait for the bus here when they could be hoofing it just as fast.
I grew up in Colorado in the early '70s and my friends and I walked everywhere. It was a necessity. I did the Volksmarches in Germany. When the kids were little, we took them out nightly in strollers. But once they became mobile, we relied more and more on our cars. Now walking, especially here, sometimes seems just plain weird.
I was just thinking of this as I walked to work a couple of times last week. Luckily for me, I live in a small urban town. I’m four or five blocks from downtown Royal Oak, and our office is another six blocks beyond that. When days are temperate and I have no pressing place to go, I’ll walk to work or to a downtown restaurant. It’s a mile and it takes me all of 20 minutes. I drive a hybrid so I feel I’m doing my part to curb my usage of fossil fuels, but the city has decided (in its infinite wisdom) to convert most of what used to be free parking into metered parking. To avoid the parking hassle, I’ll walk.
Walking, however, is not without its risks. Seldom do drivers obey the speed limit, and the sidewalk on 11 Mile Road is dangerously close to the street pavement. Car/pedestrian or car/bicycle accidents are not unheard of. My husband used to ride his bike, until one morning when he had the right of way and was almost flattened from behind.
Article comments