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I see them every day when I pull off the interstate on my way home. A young woman pushing a stroller. Two teenage boys on bikes. An older woman, also pushing a stroller and accompanied by two boys pulling a wagon. A skinny older man wearing the uniform of a fast-food worker.
They walk because they have no cars and must go from where they are to where the convenience store, the laundromat, or their workplace is. Typical of suburban sprawl at the side of interstates, this area has no sidewalks, so people with no cars much travel along the edge of a busy state highway in gravel, on grass, in ditches.
Across town, there's another route where people from town walk out to the Walmart. It's only a couple of miles from where they live, but they must go past where the sidewalk ends, treading the narrow pathway worn into the grassy shoulder of the road, across the bridge over the interstate, and through the parking lot to the Walmart.
What is wrong with us that we build this pedestrian unfriendly sprawl with no sidewalks and no provisions for anyone not driving a car?
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