Traffic Life : Passionate Tales and Exit Strategies
Edited by Stephan Wehner
An Anthology
 
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74 Declaration of the Right to Walk and Roll not been considered equals to people driving ve- hicles, whose turning radius, speed, and free- dom from even minor delays have been consid- ered paramount. It has withheld from them the right to access to whole sections of the city carved away and sepa- rated by wide interchanges that ban pedestrians or which are instead given generously to the vis- itors foreign and domestic from suburb, farm, or other cities, near and far, passing through in ve- hicles or parking their vehicles and visiting briefly, ironically valuing their pedestrian experiences in a few special places as highlights of visits and even preferred destinations, unmindful of the lo- cal communities nearby or through which these visitors travel only in motor vehicles. Having deprived them of this first right of an ur- ban citizen, the right to walk and roll on all streets, thereby leaving them without safe transportation, and without equal representation in the halls of the market place or the legislature, it has op- pressed them on all sides. It has made them, if walking or rolling along streets without sidewalks, in the eye of the law, hazards and violators of motorists' rights; their peace, comfort, safety, health, and lives are held in such low esteem that punishments for violat- ing their rights and liability to them or their es- tates for wrongs are seldom seriously pursued. It has taken from them all practical right to pub- lic right of way, even to travel to and from jobs for wages enough to buy an automobile, or to travel to an automobile dealer, or visit a cemetery. It has made them, morally, an irresponsible be- ing, as they must commit many crimes, with im- punity, provided they be done out of the pres- ence of motor vehicles. In the intersection, they
  
WALK Austin 75 are compelled to yield to any vehicle, it becoming, to all intents and purposes, their master-the law giving it power to deprive them of their lives and liberty, and to administer chastisements of loud motor-revving, tire-screeching, horn-honk- ing, shouts, foul smells, insulting gestures, litter- ing, harsh wind gusts, dust-gravel-mud-or-water spraying, vehicular assault, and injury or death. It has so framed the laws of traffic and develop- ment as to what shall be the proper causes of citations and variances; in case of public right- of-way for whom the use of public easement for walking by children or adults shall be given, as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of pedes- trians-the law, in all cases, going upon the false supposition of the supremacy of vehicle users and property owners disrespectful of community, and giving all power into their hands. After depriving them of all rights as an equal user of public infrastructure, if the owner of property or renter whose landlord pays taxes from rents, it has taxed them to support a government which recognizes them only as taxpayers and hazards to protect motorists from with expensive and ever more complex interchanges, wider lanes and buf- fers, higher fences, and faster-flowing, uncross- able roadways. It has allowed motor vehicles to monopolize and destroy the land through pollution and erosion, and to fill the land with roads and parking lots and otherwise despoil from pedestrian view and use nearly all the beautiful and convenient thor- oughfares between homes and profitable employ- ments. And from too many of such areas that they are permitted access to they can receive but a scanty use because of short-timed or missing traffic lights; absence of drinking, washing or rest room facilities; broken, automobile-blocked, gar-

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