Letter from Pedestrianica.5

From where I stand, here on this corner, waiting for a pause in the constant stream of traffic, I’d like to propose the abolishment of the button we must press in order to safely WALK. What would such a world look like? It wouldn’t be Pedestrianica, that’s for sure, but rather a weak imitation. Pedestrianica isn’t reformist, it is utopian. But my refusal to take that superfluous step toward the WALK button is, funny enough, a first step in building up a walkable world.

The WALK button is an absolute slap in the face to the pedestrian. Are we Pavlov’s dogs, city planners, is that how you see us? You’ve already created a terrain in which the pleasure of walking is but a footnote, if that. And then you go and implement this device that has no function, besides that of making us wait.

The WALK button does not hasten the changing of the light (as it should, it absolutely should). Is it there as a placebo for our frustration, as something for us to hit? Does it take any more energy for the WALK sign to appear automatically with the green light? Why offer us a false sense of power we do not have? 

If we approach the light after it’s already gone green, and didn’t notice when it changed, we have to wait another complete cycle in order to cross. And the ultimate Pedestrianican indignity: We must veer from our paths in order to press it.

Having to step behind light poles to push the button can obscure us from the view of turning cars. Making every passerby press a useless button is also a good way to spread infectious disease. And if our arms are full, the WALK button gives our burden an awkwardness we don’t deserve. It is the cars who are the awkward ones, who must circle in search of a place to rest; pedestrian movement should never be impaired by the motorist’s lack of flow. 

In case you need reminding, here’s a partial list supporting the supremacy of the pedestrian: cars smell bad, are loud, take up way too much space, are deadly (they killed nearly 7,000 pedestrians during the last decade in California alone), and rely on fossil fuels that are the cause of endless wars and drastic levels of pollution in every corner of the world.

Pedestrians, doo doo doo, are just out for a walk. The lights should bow before us when we approach.

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:

        _|

      _|

    _|

  _|

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.2

I’ve been doing a little marching lately—marching as in walking with a large group of people (not as in lifting your knees in sync with an external rhythm). This marching—which is a simple act, but which is cathartic, thrilling, terrifying, mournful, ecstatic—this marching is the action of the Occupy movement I can most fully get behind.

I’ve mentioned before the creative usefulness of walking, as have many others (Thoreau and Robert Walser, to name a few). And I’d like to explore it further in the future. But for now, let’s quickly touch on it again, and remind ourselves of the loosening that happens while in stride. The stagnancy of the desk gives way to air and stimuli; frontiers of the imagination expand. And what happens on an individual level takes place communally as well. A movement is about moving, after all, and that’s why the march is so symbolic. The world is changing right before our eyes; possibilities come into view that would have stayed obscured behind a windshield.

Not to say the more stationary aspects of Occupy are unimportant, the camps and the general assemblies with their well-honed ways of conducting large meetings. I tend to fear interacting with strangers, though, unable to articulate myself in ways I wish I could, easily annoyed by certain types within activist communities. Isolationism, then, is what I gravitate toward, ironically a symptom of car culture: each enclosed in their own machine, with no time or proximity to study the faces of those you pass. But that’s the way—for right now, at least—things are over here in my region of Pedestrianica. There are comfort zones that need to be transcended, and we’re working on it.

But marching. Marching is an act that doesn’t require verbal interaction. Most of the verbiage is canned and one way: chants. Still there’s an understanding, one that grips and that will crush you if cling too strongly to your feelings of separateness. One that after the numb refuge of individuality, can paradoxically be freeing.

And the power. Rarely do I feel such Pedestrianican power. I’m usually one small body in a sea of steel and speed, but when the crowd takes over the street (for there’s nothing more flaccid than a march that’s been restricted to the sidewalk), there is vindication. At last, one small slice of space and time not subject to the motorist’s tyranny. For once, this crowd says, you cannot go where you want, when you want. For once the streets are whose? Ours. The crowd brings to light the stupid, stunted, unadaptable nature of the car.

Which is dangerous, this smug reversal of violence. The names of the crimes in these instances—the infractions the police cite as reason for breaking out their “less than lethal” weapons—the names of these crimes are telling: obstructing traffic and pedestrian interference.

In the last couple days, the media focus actually seems to have shifted from violent protesters to violent police. News sources have been forced to address police brutality as more and more footage of it surfaces. But two of the most disturbing examples of violence during protests in the last few weeks have been at the hands of motorists. During a march in support of Oakland’s general strike on Nov. 2, a man appeared to deliberately run over two pedestrians, badly injuring both. After Oakland police failed to respond to a 911 call, onlookers ran to the nearest BART station to ask the transit police for help. After taking down information, the BART police let the man drive his Mercedes away from the scene.

And in Washington, DC, when Occupy protesters set up blockades outside of a convention center where the ultraconservative Americans for Prosperity Foundation was meeting, a driver plowed into the crowd, injuring four, including a pregnant woman and a 13-year-old boy. Rather than charge the driver, though, police chastised the pedestrians for being in the street.

It makes sense that police would be on the side of the motorists. So much of what they do is based on an ethos of bullying, and the driver’s right of way comes from a similar place: Get the fuck out of my way, pussy, I’m bigger and faster and more armored than you. And get a police officer behind the wheel? This kind of compounded power is terrifying, resulting in gratuitous high-speed chases. My old roommate was skittish about walking her dog after cops unnecessarily chased a car into our Oakland neighborhood, resulting in the deaths of two innocent people. This kind of fear is in the air on so many different levels. It divides us, which makes us even more afraid. On a side note, which is unfair, I know, and simplistic, but perhaps a topic for another time: it’s interesting that fascism rose in the years after our cities became fully infested with cars.   

There has been a call to replace the name Occupy with Decolonize. America stands on land that once belonged to other nations—the Ohlone here in Oakland, for one—and the implication of the word Occupy is imperialistic to say the least. It’s staggering to think of the layers upon layers of asphalt and cement, these concrete colonizations that smother the ghosts and bones of those whose land was stolen. When you look at it this way, the cars are just the icing on the cake. Some heavy icing, yes, some icing that's not going to be easy to scrape off. But we need to start working toward that first step, slow down this needlessly constant motion, stroll around the block for a second, acknowledge our common humanity, and discuss how we can work toward righting the injustices of the past. It’s this kind of reflection that will allow clearer visions of the future to finally come into view.

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?

Dream of a Job Like a Family

In this dream, I had a job interview at a family-run print shop. The daughter was my friend; she had long, mouse-brown hair and glasses, and she’d cut the heels off the backs of her flip-flops. I imagined her feet being very calloused as she walked all around the print shop like this and her family lovingly ridiculed her. I waited in the kitchen to be interviewed, listened to the presses in the next room, and started to feel the enormous emotional weight that was attached to this job. The previous interviewee made his exit, and he was much younger than me, and more flashily dressed. I realized I was the one they were going to hire and began to relax.

The father was a very nice man who provided a strong sense of unity. There was something sinister about this,* but not sinister enough to prevent me from wanting to work there. Once I’d been hired, we all decided to go for a walk and then a drive. On the walk, I saw that the tips of every branch of every tree had been carved into a knobbish little head with comical features and gaping wide eyes. I pretended not to notice, and when it became clear this had been the work of the daughter, I was glad I’d kept my ignorance hidden.

On the drive, we were moving through mountainous streets, somehow magically past deadlocked traffic. The car felt like it might leave the earth in that way cars sometimes do when they’re climbing a hill and then dipping. I saw an animal: a wild boar I thought, and I remarked on it. The car was filled with laughter as everyone corrected me and I saw that they were right: the animal was really a black goat. This time I was sorry I’d let my ignorance show, and I tried to change the subject back to boars: “Do you have them around here? What are they called, javelinas?”

*This dream was probably influenced by the documentary miniseries The Staircase, directed by Jean Xavier de Lestrade, which had been present in my mind.