The walkable city

 

I have been a little obsessed with the idea of the walkable city for many years now. And my very obsession with the subject keeps me from talking about it as much as I might be inclined to here. In the places where my views are particularly strong, and deeply unconventional, making my argument can feel more like a burden than a work of love, so, as with politics in general, and, historically with my feelings about library management, I tend at most to explore the subject around the edges of it.

Though longtime readers may find that to be a bit understated.

That said, in some real way, one could view my darling wife and I's venture through Japan and into France as a search for a walkable city. As people who always loved best walking our city, and vacationed to places where we walked all day, there has been for us an element of a lifelong search for a walkable city to live in. As rich and glorious is the culture of France, I think, aside from its current tragedies and collapse, we would have loved to find a place that suited us in the USA, a place where we already had a right to be and where we already spoke the language. But honestly, we couldn't find one. Perhaps being rich enough, and with a few different priorities, would have sent us to New York, Boston, or San Francisco, but while the walkability of those cities is high on a curve with other US cities, having seen more of the world, it really isn't particularly good.

Fortunately my new Belle Epoque city is the most wonderfully walkable city I have ever lived in, and maybe even that I have ever been to. No, it is not perfect, not even close. But it is grudgingly tolerable in an ideal world and exquisite in this one. And though it certainly has no better a relationship to cars than many other great European cities and I still have a fair list of complaints, I think its historic delights; even and heavy density, baked in tourism, and geography, all play a part in just what makes it so uniquely succesful in its walkability. 

But there is also one odd little feature I love that I wanted to tell you about today.

It seems obvious, and a little weird, but I never experienced it properly before this city, though I suspect it must be common across the country of France. And it is this: 

Pedestrians have the right of way in crosswalks without walk signals. 

That's it.

I know the rhetoric often states this rule, even in Minnesota for instance, but here it is functionally the rule. Every pedestrian, us included, plunges into any crosswalk with the full right to cross, and, essentially, every car stops for them. I don't mean these cars stop if they can, or the third car stops, or they are forced to stop, but they stop the same way a car would stop for a red light. Like, they stop quickly, abruptly. They stop because everyone here believes they should stop. They don't think they have the right of way! They think I do, immediately and unalterably.

Oh, we're not fools, caution still must be exercised, making sure the driver sees us is still part of walking, but generally when we are walking along our street we just walk. Every once in awhile there might be a signalled crosswalk and they still suck. The ones crossing to the beach are especially repellent and long, but mostly, corner to corner, we have the legal, customary, and traditonal right of way. 

And we and everyone other that the freshest of tourists, use it.