Letter from Pedestrianica.4

Everyone knows the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. And the fastest way to get from Point A to Point B is by car. This letter should really be a diagram, but for now, I’m just going to write my way into it.

Because this letter is not a straight line. But then it’s not a motorist, either—we’re in Pedestrianica, aren’t we? We’re going to do some meandering. Still, this will be quick, I promise: when walking, we try to keep our sights set, no matter how obscured, on Point B.

To accommodate cars, cities become a convoluted tyranny of angles. Think of all those turns you must make, softened though they may be by the guiding voice of the Garmin: rarely do they stray from 90 degrees. Your route, when mapped, looks like a series of steps:

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      _|

    _|

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Ridiculous, you say, and you’re right, and you list off a dozen exceptions: Streets that bleed into one another, that merge or veer in an ordinal direction. Scenic drives that follow the curves of rivers or bluffs. Corners with their elbows lopped off to allow for smoother turns (and longer crosswalks).

There’s a 6-way intersection near my house that I swear was designed to kill crackheads. There’s a liquor store there, and a lot of marginalized foot traffic, and though there does seem to be some sort of traffic light somewhere, we pedestrians still have to look in a lot of different directions to make sure no cars are careening towards us. This intersection frees the motorist from that 90-degree tyranny: you can turn up the diagonal street without even tapping the brake. That’s why you’re driving, right? Momentum.

Another interesting way to cut corners is the gas station parking lot. Here, if you are a motorist, if you’re waiting in line to make a right-hand turn, you can use this corner lot as a kind of warp zone, speed right on through and knock a couple minutes off your commute. If you have a more immediate goal in mind, if you need to suckle for a minute at petroleum’s pricey teat, you use this space to engage in a series of awkward maneuvers. You back up, then inch forward, then back up, then inch forward, then erratically lap the lot on your way to a better pump.

Your range of motion—best seen in spaces like these—while forceful, has its limit. 

As pedestrians, we too use this space to cut corners, but warily, as we never know from what direction you might veer. Taking the long way around can be just as tricky: the skin between gas station and street is manically permeable, a series of ins and outs that void the safety of the sidewalk, and that never cease.

Because beneath the apparent order of the right angle looms a chaos, a violent unpredictability that city planning fails to tame. Cars, by nature—even the sleekest—are clunky, are stilted and averse to curves. Paradoxically, though, they are sprawling in the amount of physical and mental space they take up.   

Letter from Pedestrianica

I go for a lot of walks. It’s how I get places, for one thing, but it also serves as a sort of therapy, a varied repetition that soothes and gets me safely past the blocks (after blocks after blocks) in my head. It can also help alleviate anger, but then again maybe it can’t: I’m talking about a theoretical world here, I’m talking ideologically. I’m talking about a world without cars.

A world with breathable air. A world without the relentless, numbing drone of motors. A world where we aren’t on that constant grave-robberly quest to unearth oil, waging eternal war, slaughtering entire populations, and, woops, poisoning oceans in the quest to get our next hit of gasoline.

A world with fast, reliable, comprehensive, cheap public transit. A world where we can bike without fear of dying. One where freeways become so extraneous, we make them parks. Where the transportation needs of the elderly and people with disabilities are given priority.

A world that is crisp rather than blurred, where we linger and pay attention to the spaces we inhabit. Where we don’t have to look for parking. Where we don’t have to look both ways. A world with some room to really move.

Am I being a diva here?

Self-righteous, maybe, I’ll accept self-righteous. And hyperbolic. But I’m just one small body in the face of a nonstop flow of hurtling, two-ton chunks of metal (how’s that for hyperbole?). There’s a power dynamic here, one that I never hear talked about, but one that becomes conversely clear in times when I ride inside those chunks of metal.

When we're behind that windshield, we are God.

We can’t go on like this. And this seems so urgent to me, and obvious. It’s seemed obvious for most of my life.

"Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries," Roethke said.

There was one walk I went on, a walk around my neighborhood the other night, in the company of a thousand other people. The Occupy Oakland movement had just voted to declare a citywide general strike for Wednesday, November 2, and I joined them as they walked around downtown in celebration. It was the kind of march that took up the entire street, the kind you usually need a permit for, but there was an odd absence of cops, which must have felt extra freeing to the marchers who’d suffered through the cops’ fascistic tactics the night before (those who weren’t in the hospital or jail). We walked: past the jail and past Mexicali Rose, past apartment buildings with people dancing on fire escapes. Past a club where my friend Gabby had gone to dance, and after seeing us all out walking, decided to come say hi. Past an enclave of condos the city subsidized but never filled. Past the freeway onramp, where a debate ensued over whether we should storm the interstate (I’m not the only one who wants to make it a park). Past my house, how convenient: goodnight.

Mainstream media pundits have complained about the OWS movement's lack of a focused message (here is a great article about why those pundits are mattering less and less). So let me walk around the block for a minute and complicate their message even further. On second thought, though, how complicated is this? One of the movement's favorite chants is “Whose streets? Our streets!”: cars, more than anything else, embody the unhealthy, unjust ways in which we occupy this planet. And the reason we all need our cars like we do stems from money. Los Angeles once had one of the most efficient streetcar systems in the world. Prior to GM's buyout of their public transit system, Los Angeles—the city whose name now conjures immediate images of gridlock—once strove for the same thing I want.

What I want is a world without cars.

The reasons for this are many, and to be honest, right now, I don’t even know where to start. So this is just the first of many Letters from Pedestrianica, the name I’ve decided to give this carless world I’ve been talking about. Even now, as I write this, those wavy red lines have attached themselves to the undercarriage of carless: Microsoft Word has decided that carless is not a word.

The software feels the same way about the word, classism. But at the rapid rate political discourse now seems to be shifting, we’ll see how long that lasts.

Welcome to Pedestrianica. It’s a mouthful, for sure, as we lift ourselves up out of the smog. But who knows what sort of things we’ll articulate, one day when we walk together, that day when we’ve finally freed ourselves of our dull and cumbersome cars?