Unit 3Out of StepBill Bryson1 After living in England for 20 years, my wife and I decided to move back to the United States. We wanted to live in a town small enough that we could walk to the business district, and settled on Hanover, N.H., a typical New England town pleasant, sedate and compact. Ithas a broad central green surrounded by the venerable buildings of Dartmouth College, an old-fashioned Main Street and leafy residential neighborhoods. 2 It is, in short, an agreeable, easy place to go about ones business on foot, and yet as far as I can tell, virtually no one does.3 Nearly every day, I walk to the post office or library or bookstore, and sometimes, if I am feeling particularly debonair, I stop at Rosey Jekes Cafe for a cappuccino. Occasionally, in the evenings, my wife and I st roll up to the Nugget Theatre for a movie or to Murphys on the Green for a beer, I wouldnt dream of going to any of these places by car. People have gotten used to my eccentric behavior, but in the early days acquaintanceswouldoftenpulluptothecurbandaskifIwantedaride.4 “Im going your way,” they would insist when I politely declined. “Really, its no bother.”5 “Honestly, I enjoy walking.”6“Well,ifyoure sure,”they would say and depart reluctantly, even guiltily,asifleavingthesceneofanaccidentwithoutgivingtheirname.7 In the United States we have become so habituated to using the car for everything that it doesnt occur to us to unfurl our legs and see what those lower limbs can do. We have reached an age where college students expect to drive between classes, where parents will drive three blocks topickuptheirchildrenfromafriendshouse,wherethelettercarrier takes his van up and down every driveway on a street.8Wewillgothroughthemostextraordinarycontortionstosaveourselves from walking. Sometimes its almost ludicrous. The other day I was waiting to bring home one of my children from a piano lesson when a car stoppedoutsideapostoffice,andamanaboutmyagepoppedoutanddashed inside. He was in the post office for about three or four minutes, and then came out, got in the car and drove exactly 16 feet (I had nothing better to do, so I paced it off) to the general store6 next door.9 And the thing is, this man looked really fit. Im sure he jogs extravagant distances and plays squash and does all kinds of healthful things, but I am just as sure that he drives toeach of these undertakings.10 An acquaintance of ours was complaining the other day about the difficulty of finding a place to park outside the local gymnasium. She goes there several times a week to walk on a treadmill. The gymnasium is, at most, a six-minute walk from her front door.11 I asked her why she didnt walk to the gym and do six minutes less on the treadmill. 12 She looked at me as if I were tragically simple-minded and said, “But I have a program for the treadmill. It records my distance and speed and calorie burn rate, and I can adjust it for degree of difficulty.”13 I confess it had not occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard.14 According to a concerned and faintly horrified 1997 editorial in the Boston Globe, the United States spent less than one percent of its transportation budget on facilities for pedestrians. Actually, Im surprised it was that much. Go to almost any suburb developed in the last 30 years, and you will not find a sidewalk anywhere. Often you wont find a single pedestrian crossing.15 I had this brought home to me one summer when we were driving across Maine and stopped for coffee in one of those endless zones of shopping malls, motels, gas stations and fast-food places. I noticed there was a bookstore across the street, so I decided to skip coffee and head over.16 Although the bookshop was no more than 70 or 80 feet away, I discovered that there was no way to cross on foot without dodging over six lanes of swiftly moving traffic. In the end, I had to get in our car and drive across.17 At the time, it seemed ridiculous and exasperating, but afterward I realized that I was possibly the only person ever to have entertained the notion of negotiating that intersection on foot.18 The fact is, we not only dont walk anywhere anymore in this country, we wont walk anywhere, and woe to anyone whotries to make us, as the city of Laconia, N.H., discovered. In the early 1970s, Laconia spent millions on a comprehensive urban renewal project, which includedbuilding a pedestrian mall to make shopping more pleasant. Esthetically it was a triumph urban planners came from all over to coo and take photos-but commercially it was a disaster. Forced to walk one whole block from a parking garage, shoppers abandoned downtown Laconia for suburban malls.19 In 1994 Laconia dug up its pretty paving blocks, took away the tubs of geraniums and decorative trees, and brought back the cars. Now people can park right in front of the stores again, and downtown Laconia thrives anew.20 And if that is