My Treacherous Walk to Town

Is walking an inherently political act? I rather think it is, in a town designed to kill you for it. Admittedly I didn’t start walking to town to protest or demonstrate anything. I did it to become less fat. But since that clearly hasn’t worked, I figured the least I could do was lecture you all about the depressing state of Canton’s pedestrian infrastructure.

Except on occasion in the epicenter of downtown, nobody walks anywhere, and it’s not because people don’t want to — it’s because they can’t. That’s because it’s dangerous and, to a lesser extent, ugly.

But the dangerousness of walking in Canton is not natural. It is not inevitable. It has not always been this way, and it does not always have to be this way. Most importantly, it is wrong.

This bears repeating. It is wrong. It is profoundly, profoundly wrong that you can be killed for wanting to walk to work, or to school, or to your friend’s house, or to the grocery store. It is a dystopia. It is against nature. It is against Progress. It is the inverse of what ought to be. And yet, this appalling state of affairs is the reality in practically every community across the country, with rare and expensive exceptions.

Before I return to that point, let me tell you about my walk. I live about two and a half miles from where I work, and it’s no exaggeration to say every time I embark, I’m gambling my life. Where I start, on outer Judson Street Road, there is no sidewalk. There aren't even paint lines separating distinct car lanes. When I hear a car coming — and they come fast, real fast — I condemn myself to the gravel edge of the road, and pray the driver isn’t scrolling through Twitter.

Walking POV of outer Judson Street Rd

This alone is one of the most terrifying aspects of life under the tyranny of Cars. Even if you do everything “right” — look both ways, wait for the light to change, walk along the sidewalk — you are still liable to be flattened by a distracted driver. And the newspapers, mysteriously, won’t blame it on the driver of 2,000 pounds of metal traveling 60 miles-per-hour. No, they’ll blame it on you for not wearing reflective hunting gear, or some bullshit.

As I continue along the road, I inevitably encounter the exploded carcass of some poor creature. Its entrails, spilled across the asphalt, serve as a shocking reminder that human beings aren’t the only living things we sacrifice to the altar of Cars.

I see trash, too. Often heaps of it, from ice cream tubs to Mountain Dew bottles to paper bags from Dairy Queen. I think littering itself has worsened with the Rise of Cars, as people don’t care about trashing streets they never have to walk on.

Once I turn left onto State Highway 310 towards Price Chopper, the real fun begins. Now 18-wheelers and lifted trucks and monstrous SUVs roar past me non-stop, seemingly oblivious to the fact of my existence. I sometimes wonder whether the drivers would even notice if they ran straight over me, like a bug hitting the windshield.

Still there are no sidewalks. If I want to go to Price Chopper, or Kinney’s, or Stewart’s, or the strip mall, there are no crosswalks. It is scandalous and unacceptable that within spitting distance, there’s so much essential shopping, yet no way to safely access it by foot. Even on a nice day, you are incentivized to perform the humiliating ritual of driving 300 feet from Price Chopper to Kinney’s when you need to pick something up from both stores.

Once I’m past Price Chopper and onto East Main Street, what might generously be called a sidewalk finally appears. Most of the stones, though, are cracked or misshapen, or have entire gardens between them, as though they are relics of a lost civilization, since indeed they are. If you can walk across this surface without spraining an ankle, you are better than me.

There are still no crosswalks. Need to cross over to that hospital building? Want to enter or leave St. Lawrence’s beautiful campus? Good luck! Crossing the street is a real-life game of Frogger — except the cars are driven by stoned 16 year-olds, and if you guess wrong, you actually die.

Even if the sidewalk was well-groomed, I doubt anyone would want to use it. After all, it’s right beside a major highway. Apart from the fact it’s unsafe, it’s perpetually and obnoxiously loud, the air is rancid from exhaust fumes, and it’s just goddamn ugly. The gray concrete and asphalt is hideous, and it criminally erases what used to be, and could again be, a beautiful view of green hillsides and fields.

That brings me back to an important point. There’s this idea in the air that people don’t want to walk in Canton. They do. They don’t because they can’t. They can’t because it’s dangerous and ugly. It’s dangerous and ugly because our town prioritizes strangers in automobiles above the people who actually live here.

And those people that live here are not fundamentally different from the ones that live in Manhattan, or Paris, or Sicily, or anywhere else people walk more. The people in these foreign lands walk more because they can — can, I mean, without being squashed into pavement — and because it’s pleasant.

There’s lots of things we could do to make Canton safer and prettier for pedestrians.

We could road-diet East Main Street. That means shrinking the car-lanes and allocating the added space for people and or bikes. On 310, we could add sidewalks, crosswalks, and speed-bumps. Then we could plant trees along the road, to beautify the area and clean the air. These changes could be done overnight, would hardly inconvenience motor traffic, and radically improve our town.

Why should we do this? Well, if I’ve learned one thing from walking to work, it’s that you can’t come to fully know or appreciate the town in which you live unless you walk through it. Walk the streets of Canton and you will be amazed what you see, and who you see, for the first time. I’ve lived here my whole life. But I’ve always felt alienated from the community in a way I couldn’t quite describe. Now I think I know why.

In Canton, there are tons of people like me who want to make the healthy and leisurely decision to walk. People who want to use their legs and breathe unpolluted air. Who want to get somewhere without operating heavy machinery. Who want to transport themselves in a way that doesn’t injure the planet or quite possibly another person. Who want to physically immerse themselves in the community. But our town, through its car-centric design, tells us that we should be killed for it. And that is radically and profoundly wrong.