In re-reading my last post, I noticed that while I explained that the challenges I faced as a pedestrian in DC colored my overall perception of that city, I didn't explain how or why that was the case.
In the last four years or so, walking has emerged as my primary mode of transport. In fact, the best thing I could say about my most recent job was that it was close enough that I could easily walk there from my apartment (red flag: I preferred ten minutes of walking through slush to 8 hours of sitting at that desk). My favorite times to walk, however, are on the weekends. I like to wake up early and walk to the grocery store and wait outside with the other insomniacs until the store opens its doors. After that, I like to run errands ("walk errands"?)--the bank, the dry cleaners, the post office. I'm privileged enough to live close to these quotidian outposts, and I try to take advantage of their proximity whenever possible. Walking from place to place gives me a sense of the goings-on in my neighborhood better than if I'd chosen to view things through my car windshield.
Boston is home to many people who travel mostly by bike, and its suburbs and exurbs are saturated with people who rely on their cars and the Mass Pike to get around. I own a car but choose not to use it very often. Driving a car seems wasteful and indulgent to me, a way of prioritizing my own personal comfort/convenience over the interests of my immediate neighborhood and the global environment. And I choose not to bike because, frankly, it freaks me out.
And so, I walk. When I lived in DC, I would walk to school. For my first year, I lived in
Adams Morgan, a lively neighborhood of ethnic restaurants, colorfully painted houses and highly unsavory frat bars. The walk from my apartment to school guided me over half-puked congealed pizza on the sidewalks lining Adams Morgan, down the hill next to the
hotel where President Reagan was shot in 1981, through Dupont Circle (arguably the gayest, but not nearly the queerest, neighborhood in the city), alongside part of
Embassy Row, and then through the two halves of Georgetown bisected by Wisconsin Avenue. I would arrive at school sweaty and incredulous that so much history could be packed into just a few miles beyond my home. And yet, my description of landmarks obscures the realities of my walk -- the dodging of cars' failures to yield, the blaring horns, the buses near-misses. I was a regular
Frogger out there trying to cross my own personal highway. DC's broad streets and ill-timed walk signals created traffic hazards at nearly every corner between my origin and destination.
Walking around a neighborhood or city tells you something about the civic and personal relationships contained within that space. In her book, the
Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs emphasizes the importance of sidewalks in building and sustaining neighbhorhoods. In her view, sidewalks generate and maintain trust by facilitating heterophilious interactions, a key attribute of a strong network. The more a community can support its pedestrians, the safer and more enriching that community can be, whether or not its sidewalks are paved with congealed cheese.
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