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 crossings like the one above just to walk a few miles makes one feel like an asshole "holding up traffic" when in fact this bad car-centric urban design is holding me up and creating barriers to car free transport. For a sustainable future, we need better urban design to allow for more car-free transport. The earth will not support a planet full of American style suburbs with their car filled roads.

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: 
"The 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 in and of themselves, but the individualistic consumption mindset that makes them the answer is 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. While Happy Valley is a "better than normal" suburb, it still suffers from a lack of direct routes for walking.

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. Protected/separated bike/walking lanes instead of sidewalks would be an improvement. Many people are deterred from biking by the sheer issue of the danger of biking inches from cars going thirty miles an hour. It seems absurd, but it is the reality in most of America.

As I waited for the bus, I watched the elderly woman by the pole walking with the type of wheeled cart people use for groceries in more walkable places, hold up an 18 wheel semi trying to make a left turn and almost running over her as it stopped in the middle of the intersection. How did she feel having a truck stopped just inches from her as she navigated the crosswalk? Being a walker makes one feel like an outsider.

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 button 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. I can't imagine someone slower making it across in time. The example of the elderly woman above is casse in point. Such a short interval let's a walker know they are invaders in this space and better hurry. The message to bikers and walkers: "you are a second class citizen here". As I write this morning, I watch a news story about two teenagers struck with minor injuries by a hit and run at a crosswalk in Portland. Not only are walkers second class, they put their lives on the line just to walk across the street. The fact that we accept death and injury  by automobile with a sort of blind double standard and a "cost of driving" is called "motornormativity". While we are up in arms about children harmed in other ways, being harmed on a road recieves little attention despite the huge number of injuries and deaths each year.

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. As I walk across, I hold up a hundred cars at the crossing and you can sometimes feel the impatience of people in a hurry to get going. There are places and cities with such urban design, but not in the United States.

On the Sunnyside Stroad route, about half of stops are just a sign, but several have a bench and the one by the hospital has a shelter. Nothing says ride the bus like sitting by ear splitting and toxic traffic while having the sun or rain beat down. I enjoyed riding and it seems like it gets plenty of riders, but accomadations could be better. Like bikers and pedestrians, transit riders are treated like second class citizens. Notice the simple white line that serves as a bike lane. Want to be paralyzed? Use an unprotected bike lane.

 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 the blogger and podcast host of the The Urbanism Agenda and 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?