Hypothetical Pedestrians

An article in our Elk Grove Citizen newspaper on Oct. 14th highlighted how walkable Elk Grove is. It most certainly is...provided you have absolutely no need to get anywhere or do anything while on foot.

We have miles and miles of sidewalks, all of which, yes, are in fantastic shape. The problem is the miles and miles part -- caper about by foot to the store or anywhere else and you'd better prepare to spend a few hours walking.

The woman writing the article, Katie Freeman, exposed two very important points about why, in my opinion, our Elk Grovian low density suburban design is so damn bad. Her first point was how she would love to be able to walk to work. This implies she doesn't live close enough today to do that. Truthfully, it's never likely that many of us would ever have an option to walk directly to work from home no matter the density or layout, but if we did things right, then Katie would have no more than a 1/4 mile walk to a transit stop that would provide a sufficient level of service to get to her job. In most cases, the vast, vast majority of Elk Grovians don't even have that option because their jobs aren't even in the city and even if they were, many Elk Grovian homes and businesses aren't easily accessible to transit.

The next point is more telling -- a fifth of her article isn't about Elk Grove at all -- it's about the civic design of another city, Campbell, in the South Bay. She waxes on how she could walk to the cute downtown area, how she'd run into friends or acquaintances on the way, how two groceries were within the range of the foot, although to access them she'd need to be exposed to the brutal traffic of the expressway.

So, let's take a hypothetical walk here on my monologues, shall we? Let's consider a walk to downtown Elk Grove from my house, near Franklin Blvd. and Bighorn.

So...tell me...which way do I start walking? West? South? East? Where exactly is our cute downtown area?

Well, unless you believe that Elk Grove Boulevard is a real downtown, clearly a stretch of anyone's imagination, there ain't one. Don't even have one. Once I start walking, all I'm ever going to get is a mile along a collector road followed by a commercial strip mall clusterfuck followed by a mile of more collector road followed by another commercial strip mall clusterfuck followed by another mile of co...

There are no real destinations in our city, because we didn't build any. Didn't think they were important.

So I can't even start my hypothetical walk because I have no downtown to walk to. Just like all 135,000 of my neighbors -- they are all hypothetical pedestrians, too. Nowhere to walk.

So let's change my hypothetical destination; instead of a non-existent civic/public realm, let's just say I want to walk to get $40 from the bank and buy a cup of joe. I exit the house and unless I want to walk two miles more than I really have to, I need to avoid every curvilinear street. So that takes 79% of my walking options off the table. All our non-car dominated streets are suburban curvilinear, so I'll either end up walking in half-circles or I'll dead end and have no choice but to get out to Franklin, our sole N-S collector road. Along Franklin I walk, alongside four lanes of traffic. Sure, I have a nice walkway, and a nice physical separation from the traffic, but I get to listen to the din of engines the entire time. I walk a mile to get to the bank, buried in a strip mall across the six-lane Laguna Highway, our local E-W collector road. The bank is set back another 200 feet from the sidewalk, across a sea of parking and I jockey for right-of-way with all the cars endlessly circling the parking lot looking for the spot closest to the entrance. I extract my cash and set out for another 4/5th mile walk along Highway Laguna to the non-local coffee shop, buy my java and rest at the outdoor table, with a wonderfully relaxing view of all six lanes of traffic. I finish my joe, and then return home the same way. I spend a total of nine minutes waiting for the light to change at all the intersections to cross legally. I spend fifty five minutes walking the 3-3/5 miles. I spent nearly as much time waiting to pedestrianate across the intersections as it would have taken me to get in my car and drive.

Katie's last sentence is sublime: "The next time you're lacking something to do, try taking a walk in your neighborhood."

Yes, you'd better have nothing else to do if you're going to walk.