Walking has plummeted across America
axios.com
axios.com
In two separate visits to Alabama, whenever I walked a couple of kilometers from where I was staying to the closest shop, a driver passing by called out "f-ggot!". I had been warned beforehand that people don’t walk there, and my local contacts all agreed that that slur was due only to the fact that I was walking. My ultimate conclusion was that unless you live in a community where people do walk, walking anywhere in the US comes with social stigma, and people are reluctant to be seen as weirdos.
it's really cool
"You can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride."
I was 18 and in community college. I couldn't drive so relied on rides to and from. Sometimes I had several hours between classes so initially I went for long walks since there wasn't much else to do. There was a quiet neighborhood across the street so I usually walked around there.
That stopped after a cop drove up to me and ordered me to state my business. "What are you doing here?" he asked.
"I'm just walking around," I said. "I-"
"_Why_?" he asked, looking incredulous, like I had just said I had been trying to skateboard on the back of a turtle.
Apparently he had been called because of my "suspicious activity": there were some cool rocks on the shoulder of the road that I had stopped and fussed over. (And probably pocketed, because hey, cool rocks)
There's your reasonable suspicion: college kid picking up interesting stones from the public shoulder of a road.
If Mr. Policeman says you look suspicious, guess who's getting stopped?
I'm not saying the cop can't ask you questions, I'm saying he can't demand your ID and run it for warrants, and you're free to leave that situation if you want.
That feels OK to point out.
First example: representative, especially if you have dark skin.
Second example: representative, because Alabama.
Harassment from drivers is not an every day occurrence but it's not uncommon. Anecdata and I don't know how it compares to other nations.
Another: I heard a story on a podcast a few years ago about a woman who, in pouring rain, chose to drive to a PTA meeting at her child's school rather than walk. Now, this would make sense in most circumstances, but this woman's front door was quite close to the school entrance -- closer, in fact, than the school's parking lot was. By driving, she actually increased how far she walked.
There's a lot of ingrained driving culture in the US, unfortunately, and I'm sure that WFH and transit avoidance in a post-COVID world have made it that much worse.
That has happened to me before in a scenario similar to the original poster's scenario, walking between a hotel and supermarket. This was in Texas. Perfectly polite, they probably just assumed that my car was in the shop.
If you wanted to walk in peace in a neighborhood like that you would need to get a dog.
Then there are the places that are drive-through only and don't bother to update their listings on map apps or even the company's own store finder. If you won't pay enough to find enough staff to open for walk-ins after several months, it's time to admit you're drive-through only and update the listings. Walkers famously value our lungs and don't want to stand in line behind cars, and would rather walk on somewhere else.
US and Europe are, very roughly speaking, the same size in terms of landmass but Europe has more than double the population. So US is "relatively" empty.
You can pave sidewalks, people don't walk because the grid of urban "space-time" is too spread apart to access anything by foot. It's not just because of lack of infrastructure sometimes, it's principally because most distances in a urban place with cars are car distances
Even though a suburbs sidewalk is just as "walkable" mechanically, it's much less fun. We don't want simply walkable streets, we don't want to think about walking at all. In modernity, health is an activity and consumer demographic onto itself. Seeing someone jogging in outfit has the air of class that a person simply walking to a destination doesn't have when we look at them, even though the person walking has healthy exercise figured, not as part of their lifestyle, but guaranteed in it.
I think bicyclists get the most grief here, mostly because cars don't like sharing the road and bikes tend to slow down traffic.
Alabama is hell.
There are parts of the U.S. where walking is very common. But even there, our car drivers are out of control, and there is very little traffic enforcement.
But anecdotally, I've never been stopped walking or running anywhere. Occasionally but rarely someone honks or yells out something obnoxious out of a car.
Sidewalks are surprisingly empty though, even in urban areas. Even in Boston, the "third most walk-able city", there are a lot of beautiful places where you just don't see many people.
Same trip, I ended up renting a car and going to Bodega Bay where I was again screamed at by a driver who was apparently upset with my driving (this was on the access road to the park). The "f" word was used at me as well.
I'm not sure walking explains it all. There seems to be an abundance of miserable people in this country...
?? That’s just surreal
I grew up in Pennsylvania and Ohio, have lived in Texas, Georgia, and California, and spent significant time in the Carolinas, Alabama, and Tennessee. I've never had any problems when I've been on foot. I've had a lot of problems on a bike, though. Had someone try to run my off the road in North Carolina, have had people throw shit at me in California (central coast area), and have had lots of derogatory shit yelled at me (I never knew riding a bike made you gay, I always thought it was something very different!) by people driving by basically everywhere. Most of those happened in places without dedicated biking infrastructure or lanes.
Where I'm at now, in SoCal, I haven't had any problems or otherwise heard anything anecdotally.
Whenever I visit the US I'm horrified at the pedestrian-crushing machines people use for personal transport.
Distracted driving in the US is a nightmare. The number of people I see clearly no paying attention to the road is horrifying. Just today I was almost hit because someone was on their phone.
We have distracted driving laws, but they aren't enforced.
The problem is that the collected fine moneys go to enrich the local police; it is hard to not see this as a protection racket.
Speeding, along with driving under the influence, are the leading causes of traffic injuries and deaths. They are easy to catch, but they aren't pointless stops.
Walking is one of my primary modes of blood sugar management. An insulin dose combined with walking leads to a much stronger response. As diabetes and other metabolic diseases are on the rise in the US, I can't help but think we should be prescribing more walking.
We should be encouraging people to walk daily. This one simple trick would have profound impacts on our metabolic dysfunction, heart disease, and cancer rates.
The Levels Health people have a lot of data on this. Taking a walk after eating a meal can blunt the blood sugar spike by upwards of 50% (depending on the food and the duration of the walk). They did a study that showed walking after drinking a can of Coke drastically cut the blood sugar spike.
He said that he thinks exercise is far more important than diet to weight loss. I thought this was a bit controversial, but according to all his anecdata, the people who actually manage to lose weight are the people that are training.
I think if you train really hard, diet can follow. But even the benefit of exercise without a strict diet seem underrated.
Edit: more thoughts
Exercise is also easier than dieting. I find it much easier to do something than to not do it. Food access is a huge issue in many places, but you should be able to walk and do some basic training no matter where you are.
1) Exercise helps with hormone regulation, including testosterone 2) Exercise improves mood, focus, and sleep, all of which help with stress eating and mindless snacking 3) Exercise builds and maintains lean tissue mass, which increases your metabolism 4) Sufficient exercise has been shown to blunt appetite (300 minutes a week)
Exercise puts you into place to be successful.
People who train daily just get so many benefits. One thing I read said you can sort of outrun a poor diet with enough exercise (combo of resistance and cardio). But, again, doing both yields really good results.
I wonder how the distribution changed. People who walked everywhere beforehand would, I guess, have had fewer places to walk to. People who typically drove everywhere might have had nothing to do but take a walk.
But, on the face of it, seems like just bad news, we’re already pretty sedentary, and getting worse.
Edit: I guess this study really doesn't measure for that(?). A three-mile walk for exercise through the neighborhood counts as one "trip" whereas a few 250-meter walks across parking lots count as a few trips.
https://www.strava.com/heatmap#7.00/-120.90000/38.36000/hot/...
But both show that you can make unwalkable areas highly walkable. People love going to Disney and being able to safely walk around.
Well I'm glad mass surveillance and spying on phone data resulted in something kinda useful. Efficient nagging!
It's a huge reason American cities are so car centric, too.
Constant, random shit-talking of our generation was the norm set by uncreative thinkpiece authors as we were growing up, so it can be easy sometimes to fall into that mindset. Blame whoever was writing popular media from like 1995-2015.
Now seem to be even buying up all the scraps (with cash) that are left over with their enormous savings from the market bull run and housing boom. While enjoying high interest rates of their savings.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/11/13/housing-m...
And we're leaning even more heavily into it. Self-driving cars change a lot of things, but they still contribute to the notion that things can be arbitrarily far apart. If we're very lucky, it will mean that fewer people will own their own cars, and maybe they'll demand infrastructure where they won't have to pay to go to the grocery store. But even that happens on a nuclear fusion time scale (always 20 years away).
So no, we're not getting a walking utopia when the Boomers croak. That can't happen until their buildings and roads also rot away.
In the US in 2023, the majority of people don't want non-car infrastructure. So realistically widespread/easily available/universal biking/walking friendly infrastructure in the US will probably happen in 2070, if it happens at all.
I'd hope that people with mobility issues could first reach for:
1. Recumbent bikes: https://www.getcycling.org.uk/recumbents/ (first regular ones, then electric)
2. Trikes: https://www.getcycling.org.uk/tricycles/ (first regular ones, then electric)
3. Handcycles: https://www.getcycling.org.uk/handcycles/
4. Wheelchair tandems where possible: https://www.getcycling.org.uk/wheelchair/
And only 5. or so should be mobility scooters, where they makes sense.
Because of the lack of bike infrastructure/walkable neighborhoods, I think the default in the US is directly a mobility scooter.
My girlfriend and I like to guess where other tourists we see on the streets are from and one of the most obvious indicators for Americans is that as soon as they hit 40-50 there’s a high chance they're either limping or using a cane or similar.
My theory used to be that a lot of them played high-impact sports such as (American) football or basketball in their youths and consequently ruined their knees. But honestly not being used to walking might also contribute
This is part of why some people don't get out more... the creepy people watchers.
Maybe someone in the near future will create an analog to the first person shooter, a first person labeler, that will keep some of these folks on the couch.
do you think that people are rude and insulting to others by default?
this is a common occurrence for people who act this way towards others. if you engage in the above behaviors, then you likely assume everyone else does too, and therefore are reasonably upset at the mean things and sneering you anticipate others engaging in. it's really important in these scenarios to recognize that your actions and others are most likely not the same, most people don't just shit on strangers for 'fun'.
Could you elaborate further as to why you do?
Your description of people watching sounds innocent, considerate even, but I think you're leaving out the display of open contempt that is so common these days.
It's relaxing, doesn't cost anything, can be done in many places.
The stronger you are, the longer you will be able to move.
Boomers are between 59 and 78, so that there are a fair number that can’t walk a single block isn't surprising (Silents are even worse in that respect.)
> It's a huge reason American cities are so car centric, too
No, its not. Its true that when that trend began, most Boomers couldn't walk, too (for the opposite reason; many were too young, more weren't born at all), but that really wasn't the driving factor.
Racism was a pretty big factor, as well as corporate interests.
I apologize for invoking Godwin's law, but Nazi Germany is a good example, as were/are communist countries blaming everything on 'the capitalist', feminist blaming things on the patriarchy, European (and possible American) far right parties blaming everything on immigrants...
"it's the fault of $OUTGROUP" has been a beloved tool of demagogues everywhere for centuries now.
wars of religion, for example, witch hunts... yeah. People will do a lot of awful things to other people to avoid confronting their own flaws.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention-source/obesi...
> Roughly two out of three U.S. adults are overweight or obese (69 percent) and one out of three are obese (36 percent).
Disgusting trends
Aka 99% of people out there?
I'm the "fat end of normal" and nobody has ever consisdered calling me fat. Once you get over 6' the BMI chart gets absurd, assumingly due to physiological differences in population from then and now. Take someone who is 6'3". 150-190 lbs is "normal". If most people saw a 150 lb 6'3" man, they'd say they look emaciated. I would guess that most 6'3" men who look fit still weigh over 190lbs.
> 6'3". 150-190 lbs is "normal"
Yes, that is normal. Go to other countries that have tall people, and most of them will easily fall into that range.
Americans as a whole are INCREDIBLY overweight in general.
It should be better. Somehow much of europe manages to allow people the possibility to step outside and easily walk anywhere: shops; restaurants; even paths along rivers, through forests or farmland -- places that would, if in USA, be fenced off and posted with (bullet-holed) "no trespassing" signs.
Or is it Stockholm syndrome.
As an aside, that Wikipedia article describes the interesting history of the "red state" and "blue state" terminology which apparently wasn't in usage until the 2000 Presidential election, because broadcast networks previously used the colors interchangeably (even intentionally so, to avoid favoritism).