Casey Gilfillan

The landscape is both unwalkable and undrivable. Last weekend, they had a festival on my block and shut off both ends of the street until 10pm. On such occasions, the public lot where I park becomes even more popular than usual, so I attempt to avoid using my car after 9am. The last time I worked on one of these Saturdays and arrived home at the event’s peak, I had to park a 30 minute-walk away from my apartment. Luckily it was nice out.

This is not a story of woe, but one to explain the basis for my next course of action. This year I was not working on the day of the event, but planned to attend a fitness class in Philadelphia around 2:30pm. With the unfortunate timing that gave my return home, I decided to go full commuter; this involved a 40 minute walk to the train station, a 20 minute train, a 7 minute walk to the second train which I only rode for two stops, then a final walk of 20 minutes to class, and of course doing that all in reverse a few hours later. I live in a suburban neighborhood, and walked through an increasingly wealthy area as I approached the train station. As I crossed the line between my town and the next, into the local heart of the white-collar tax bracket, the line was drawn in a more literal way by a lack of sidewalk. Bilaterally, the sidewalk disappears and you’re left to fend for yourself around the curvy bend of a road. Sure, it’s a suburban area and the speed limit is 25mph, but these are essentially back roads, and people don’t always follow rules when they suspect they aren’t being watched.

Ultimately it was fine, but it was scary – I took my headphones off so I could hear cars while trying to look around the bend, which is also heavily obscured by foliage. One of the houses had a wrap-around wall of shrubbery, at least 5”5 because it was taller than me, blocking my entire view of the road ahead, which I had no choice but to walk on. There were two different sections of this town, along the same street, that had missing sidewalks on both sides for multiple blocks. The sections without sidewalks had neatly-manicured lawns that fanned out to the very edge of the property, the green carpet leading up to the gargantuan mansions sitting upon them. Something about the setup felt intentional, as though only those who purchased property and live in this specific strip are permitted to walk through. It made me feel like more of an outsider, the lack of sidewalk effectively communicating that if they wanted passersby, they would facilitate such travel.

I walked it without becoming roadkill, but could not help but take those thoughts from the experience. This is not the first time I’ve walked in a suburban area and have found questionably safe or altogether missing sidewalks. The US operates by a car-first philosophy, leaving pedestrians and commuters as an afterthought, if one at all. However, even with this car-centric mentality, I would posit that the roads and flow of traffic render themselves undrivable. The problem drivers face is not quite the same as the one commuters have with accessibility, but rather one of roadway efficacy. 

Driving home the other day, I was attempting to make a left turn onto one of the pikes. Sure, the pike is a major roadway (still only one lane in each direction), but in the specific area I was in, the perpendicular roads connect to small towns and neighborhoods, making it not a particularly high traffic or retail area. Despite this, and regardless of the fact that it was only 2:45pm on a Wednesday, the intersection was flooded with cars. Flooded so badly with cars by the way, that the left turn lane could not turn left when the arrow indicated because the other lane was already backed into and blocking the intersection.

Stereotype likes to tell us that rush hour starts at five o’clock and maybe that was true at some point, before there were 290 million vehicles on the road and vastly non-traditional schedules dominated the workforce, but it is no longer true. It’s not “safe” (in the sense of wanting to avoid traffic and protect your sanity) to be on the road after 12pm some days, and the congestion can last until 7 or 8pm. There is nothing more disheartening than when I get out of work at 8:30pm and stupidly think I’ll have a stress-free drive home, only to see a mob of cars in the direction I need to turn.

My point in bringing any of this up is to suggest intentionality behind the wall I and many others run up against when simply trying to exist. You have to go to work, but it’s nearly impossible to get there and home in a timely fashion, so you leave early and give more of your time, energy, and a small piece of your soul each time as you languish in the purgatorial gridlock. I believe this to be the very purpose of the design – you are so worn down, exhausted by the effort of being alive, merely traveling (whether it is walking, driving, etc.), or other mundane activities that have been hijacked to drain you, manufactured to induce your struggle. They do this so that we’ll stop complaining, because there is so much to complain about. There are so many things wrong in the world, such as real political and environmental threats to our livelihood, down to the very minute things wrong in our towns, such as unsafe walkways and faded crosswalks, in our jobs, or in our own homes. If they overload you with problems – a new horror headline every day, another gridlock to sift through after a long shift – you’ll be too tired to complain about all of it, maybe any of it. And you’ll probably end up overlooking the really villainous stuff going on, on account of your diluted focus and general state of disillusion. The fruits of complaint fatigue, all by design.