or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Hate the Machine
Spreading the gospel of the pedestrian lifestyle
by Joe Tarr
I have dark, black thoughts. Ugly, violent fantasies. I’m walking along Western Avenue towards downtown, carrying a gun. It’s not just any gun, but a special one—a sort of squirt gun that contains corrosive acid, or maybe some nasty oil-based paint. In this fantasy, with the gun wedged in the top of my pants, I feel powerful and smug as I approach the intersection of Henley Street, where I am anxious to mete out justice.
I know that when the light turns green, and the little sign across the street flashes the green walking man, signifying that it’s safe for me to cross this six-lane monstrosity of a road, it will not matter. One by one, all the cars turning right onto Henley will ignore this sign and whiz by me, as if I was a lamppost, less than human. A few of them will even heckle me—some yahoo in the passenger seat of truck might chirp, “Yo, dude!” and all of them will laugh. Ha, ha, ha, look at the poor dumb pedestrian, the little freak trying to get across the road.
In my fantasy, I get my quiet revenge, splattering each and every automobile with my magic corrosive fluid that will eat through steel and plastic, lowering each car’s resale value and hiking the motorists’ insurance rates.
Sometimes in my fantasy I have supernatural powers, and I hex thoughtless drivers, making it so that motor vehicles will never again operate for them. They’ll turn the ignition, but the engine won’t budge. When they tow their car to the garage, the mechanic will start it up without any problem. I wonder how long it would take before I could disable every careless driver in Knoxville, and people would be forced to find other modes of transportation, as carpools and bus ridership swelled, and people started thinking of Knoxville as a progressive city. If I had such power, I would bring this city to its knees, and you would thank me for it, you thoughtless, cruel motorists who drive around like you own the damn place, and you will understand the beauty of walking, and you will lose weight and stop voting for Republicans, and the world will stop building highways and we’ll take trains and buses everywhere, and we’ll stop polluting the air, and we’ll end terrorism, and the French will be our friends again, and...
Oh, um, hey... Hi. How’s it going?
For about the last six years, walking has been my main mode of transportation around Knoxville. I mostly find it relaxing—a perfect way to get going in the morning or unwind at the end of a workday. And I never have to worry about drinking and driving.
I don’t begrudge people who rely on cars to get around. I just wish they’d stop trying to kill me. And I wish this city wasn’t so oblivious to the fact that people do walk.
OK, perhaps I exaggerate just a little. But Knoxville drivers are pretty damn rude and heartless. My complaints:
• Many drivers are oblivious to pedestrians. On several occasions, college kids around Fort Sanders or workers at nearby businesses have almost taken me out in their hurry to get back home. My corrosive acid/magical disabling fantasy first arose a few years ago when I was crossing 16th Street at Cumberland and some stupid woman nearly ran over my foot as she made a left turn.
More than once I’ve imagined my bones crunching underneath the wheels of a Ford Excursion and my skull cracking against the blacktop, my useless brains smeared into the substance that shares my name. How apropos. Better take up arms against the mechanical demons before it’s too late.
• Construction crews seem to have no awareness that people actually use sidewalks. Every month a new sidewalk is barred with a chainlink fence.
In the past year or so, in downtown alone, sidewalks have been closed in at least four spots on Gay Street (not including the Gay Street Bridget), three sections on Clinch Avenue, three sections of Market Street, a section of Wall Avenue, three chunks of Union Avenue, both sides of State, and various sections of Market Square.
The reconstruction of Market Square was especially unfriendly to walkers, particularly women in high heels, who had to traverse gravel, mud, and slippery particleboard.
Why can’t Knoxville build some of those scaffold walkways that make it possible for people to continue to pass?
Fort Sanders has been just as bad. Several sections of Laurel, Clinch, White avenues have been closed, as well as 11th, 12th, 22nd, 21st, James Agee—and that probably doesn’t even cover it. The sidewalks were closed on both sides of Cumberland near 11th Street because of the construction of the university’s mammoth parking lot. Road construction shut down sidewalks along the Cumberland I-40 interchange, forcing UT students to forge the highway-esque road in a dangerous spot, and made passage through the Tyson Park impossible. Last week, walking to work, I came across a KUB crew excavating one side of Laurel. On the other side, the utility company parked a truck on the sidewalk.
The rebuilding of the Clinch Avenue viaduct closed that road for more than a year and forced me (and many others) to make a several-block detour (and make that perilous crossing at Henley Street).
With more buildings expected to be renovated or demolished, a parking garage and library in the works, I expect more sidewalk closings soon.
• Traffic signals are strategically set to give walkers the least amount of time crossing streets. Take the intersection of Gay Street and Summit Hill Avenue: when the light on Gay turns green you have about three steps before the pedestrian light starts blinking yellow. Pity the handicapped or elderly person who is a little bit slow.
Frequently you’re left standing on a corner for several minutes before you’re provided a precious few seconds to dash across. A friend of mine who lived in New York City for nine years says that in that city there are few delays. Pedestrian flows are rarely delayed for more than a few seconds, with the north-south flowing avenues being slightly more difficult to traverse.
But I must admit my love of New York—my holding it up as some sort of ideal—is peculiar. New York drivers are notoriously rude and impatient. But there are so many walkers in the Big Apple they have managed to claim a significant amount of space as their own.
One of my best friends loves to drive. He typically gets a new car every other year, and he currently has three, all Hondas. He’s the best driver I know—alert, quick to react, yet cool and confident.
I asked him why he loves cars so much. He says it stems from a love of machines, both simple and complex, with parts that interact to perform a function. “Driving a car puts me in touch with the machine. I like the sensations of a car,” he says.
“I totally get into reading the car and sometimes the car feels like an extension of myself. The metal disappears, and I feel as if I’m soaring down the highway on my own. I can feel the wind on my face—sometimes literally,” he adds. “A car allows me to get away. Public transportation just isn’t the same. My car lets me keep my own schedule. It allows me to get away in solitude. I always felt bound to my family, and when I got my first car it was such an exhilarating feeling of freedom.”
Hearing him talk about driving makes me want to go climb into my car and head for the mountains, blasting my stereo. I understand the thrill of a roadtrip, of an aimless Sunday drive, of getting lost in some part of town you’ve never been to, of speed, of air blowing through the windows.
But more often than not, I feel trapped by my car. On the rare occasions I have to drive out to West Knoxville at rush hour, I marvel that people endure such a commute every day—the congestion, the cars creeping along at frustratingly slow pace, while others zoom in and out of lanes, and you get sandwiched in-between menacing tractor trailers. It leaves me far more frazzled than walking. On game days, I am thankful that I can usually get where I need to go without ever getting in my car. Every morning, I’m just thankful I don’t have to hunt for a parking space, and at the end of the day, there’s no mad dash to get home. Despite its dangers, my world seems saner.
I’ve long thought that the country would be better off if we lower the drinking age to 16 or 18, but increased the driving age to 21 or even 25.
Of course, it would be impossible to do this. Our infrastructure requires people to drive. That infrastructure is bound to collapse eventually. We’ll run out of oil, and we’ll be left with millions of miles of useless concrete passages, acres of parking lots that the wind, rain, and cold will do their magic on, as first weeds, then shrubs and eventually trees will crack free.
Until then, we shall be at odds, you and I, dear motorist. Perhaps one day, we’ll meet in a violent collision, some metaphysical marriage of man and machine, as your hood briefly kisses and embraces me, before tossing me out of this world.
March 25, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 13
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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