To Feel Like An Asshole, Just Walk Across Your Town.

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It is bad enough to walk next to a busy multi-lane road, but have to cross four or five of these crossings just to walk a few miles makes one feel like an asshole "holding up traffic" when in fact they are holding me up and creating barriers to car free transport.
As an avid urban hiker, I love to put on a good pair of shoes, strap on a backpack, and hit the streets. Invariably, urban walking in America involves frustrations with geography and urban design that prioritize cars over humans trying to walk or bike. During our stay in the Portland, Oregon metro, I've logged 5 to 10 miles daily on the mix of streets and trails that make up this area. When possible, I try to avoid the indignities of walking near multi-lane roads, but sometimes it is unavoidable.

Portland is considered to be in the upper tier of cities that are great for bikers, walkers, and transit users, but even with that said, the geography of the automobile still dominates.

Happy Valley, the "better than normal" suburb because of its walkable design, ample trails, and ability to get most things done without getting into a car, is still car-centric. I have never seen more Teslas than on the streets and neighborhoods of this affluent middle-class suburb. While I appreciate the slightly better attributes of electric cars, they are still not planet savers. From a walker's perspective, they are quiet and save me from breathing noxious gases, but as writer Farhad Manjoo wrote in his New York Times column: 
"That problem isn’t just gas-fueled cars but car-fueled lives — a view of the world in which huge private automobiles are the default method of getting around. In this way, EVs represent a very American answer to climate change: To deal with an expensive, dangerous, extremely resource-intensive machine that has helped bring about the planet's destruction, let’s all buy this new version, which runs on a different fuel."
  A "very American" answer to climate change, the electric version is still part of the problem. Cars are not the problem, but the individualistic consumption mindset that makes them the answer. We will not solve climate change until we get beyond our destructive American habits.

 The suburb is bisected by Sunnyside Road, a four to six-lane "stroad" that I like to call Sunnyside Stroad. The most direct route from east to west involves following this street with its mind-numbing, lung-occluding, ear-splitting, incessant traffic flow.
Despite Portland's vaunted status as a biker super city, here, like many other places, bikers are protected from traffic streams by a painted white line and nothing more. As a biker, when faced with such things, I ride the sidewalk and don't give a dam what the laws are. The police have bigger things to worry about. 

To add insult to injury, there are several north-south "stroads" that one has to cross in the space of four miles. Hitting the walk butto gives mere seconds to cross followed by an 18-second timer. I'm a fast walker who makes it across with 10 seconds to spare.  Such a short interval let's a walker know they are invaders in this space and better hurry.
By crossing a road in front of traffic, the design of the road and the timer make one feel like an invader and a sort of "asshole" holding up the flow of traffic when it really should be the other way around. There are places and cities with such urban design, but not in the United States.
 Sometimes, the walk signal takes an interminably long time to come. If there is no traffic, in another form of rebellion similar to biking the sidewalk, I run across, again, thumbing my nose at an entire system that works against anything but driving an expensive projectile.
It is three miles from where I stay to the miles of hiking trails on the urban nature reserve of Mount Talbert. There is a bus every thirty minutes if one can catch it, but timing it wrong, i mostly just walk the disturbing stroad. A bus as a "walking accelerator," as Jason of the vlog Not Just Bikes calls them, saves me the absurd, time-consuming experiences of standing on a corner waiting for a hundred cars to be stopped so I can cross and everyone can stare and wonder: why is he walking? While at the same time, I am asking: why are they driving?