I don’t even mean in a “Ayy I’m walking here” kind of way. Today I was getting my airbags replaced for a couple hours so I was just walking around (Nowhere to go to because it was one of those near-the-highway places with nothing but department stores and car dealerships, but that’s a different discussion.) Literally, it seemed like the entire layout of the area was saying “Fuck you, drive around” Like, there was barely even any sidewalks, which you’d think would be the bare minimum but nope.
The one place worth going to was this supremely out of place fountain, but to get there I had to do several different crossings of a very busy street, with nothing to help but those damn buttons you’re supposed to push to, I think, make a red light (they didn’t work, whoopity-do) and one crossing didn’t even have that. Eventually I decided “Screw it”, since there was no “official” crossing, so I just crossed the rest of the way from one of those tiny concrete islands. I didn’t get run over, of course, but now I think about how comparatively easy it was for me, being able to walk on my feet; I can’t even imagine how much worse it is in, say, a wheelchair. I guess America hates anyone not driving.
Suffice to say that the whole time I was thinking of this painting
Walkings free
We’re weird here in Australia, a loooooot of suburban places will only have pavement (“sidewalk”) on one side of the street. And it’s like, cool I have to zig zag from side to side if I don’t wanna walk in dirt (or someone’s literal front garden, we don’t really do picket fences here) half the time I’m walking (this is Australia we don’t have grass we have dirt)
Unintentionally funniest part of this post is that I couldn’t even dox myself if I described it in more detail, since these places are literally everywhere in Amerikkka 🙃
I grew up in a walking city, I remember as a kid being very weirded out that there were no sidewalks in the suburbs.
Yeah, it really sucks. Reminds me of when I was canvassing for bernard last year in Iowa, walking around in neighborhoods there were some sidewalks but they were really cracked and uneven, and flooded in many spots from melted snow. Trying to get from one neighborhood to another we were walking through mud 50cm from the edge of a busy road, and having to cross without right-of-way. These places were easily within walking distance of each other, but terrible to walk because of hostile design.
