The Freedom To Stop

What walkability does to the texture of life

In response to one of my tweets of Monday’s piece—semi-rhetorically asking what the value of walkable urbanism really is when you can easily drive everywhere you need—Leah Libresco, a conservative Catholic writer with, as far as I can tell, a similar view of urbanism as mine, wrote:

One nice thing about walking/biking is my openness to my environment as I go. It’s trivial to pause and talk to a neighbor, look at a cool dog, etc. With a car, stopping means something is going wrong.

That reminded me of something else I wrote once: “The car is the freedom to move, but not the freedom to stop.” That was from a piece about going on a nature walk, and my thoughts on how our reliance on the car altered our perception of space and caused arguments that would not otherwise have occurred:

The parking lot, as the naturalist warned it might be in his event page, was full. We idled the car and waited for someone to leave.

Five minutes, ten minutes, 20 minutes. A couple with a dog went to their car—and pulled out a dog bowl, gave the dog a drink, and hit the trails again. A young woman walked into the parking lot—to meet another young woman who had walked there, presumably from her nearby house, and reenter the park.

The naturalist came over and noted that while this was the tightest parking lot in the region that he knew of, he had never seen it so packed. We might need to drive another 15 miles to the next major park.

The feeling of being trapped in a car with nowhere to put it and no way to get out of it is not a feeling of freedom. The car is the freedom to move, but not the freedom to stop.

Finally, a couple of young men who didn’t see the line that had formed behind us grabbed a spot at the other end of the lot that had opened up. They got into an argument with someone else who had been waiting too (and who, I think, was himself behind us in the line I’d informally started but didn’t know it.) When the two fellows got out of their car, we also told them, without yelling, that there was an informal line, and they actually agreed to leave. I didn’t say no, but I felt a little bad.

The park, it turned out, was huge and mostly empty.

It’s the same feeling of panic and frustration as trying to park in the city for a restaurant reservation, or run into a really crowded store. There’s plenty of room for everyone. Just not their cars. If you are in a car, it’s so easy to take that personally—to feel like the absence of an easy parking spot is an attack on you and your freedom to get where you’re going. It creates feelings of urgency, of paranoia, of literally not knowing where to go or what to do. One solution is to pave over enough things to make “enough” parking. One is to cultivate patience. Another is to not take the car in the first place. Easier said than done.