Traffic Life : Passionate Tales and Exit Strategies
Edited by Stephan Wehner
An Anthology
 
Order your copy now!
  The Buckmaster Institute, Inc.

previous ........... ........... next
76 Declaration of the Right to Walk and Roll bage-container-blocked, littered, automatic-sprin- kler sprayed, boulder-or-brush-covered, low-tree- limb canopied; or absent sidewalks; or sidewalks with ill-placed mail-boxes, sign and utility poles, utility boxes, vehicle barricades, construction ma- terials and equipment, and other hazards. For any access without a personal vehicle to most areas they must endure great hardship to reach public transit services because of the long dis- tances resulting from motor-vehicle-scaled, low- density and segregated-use development. It closes against them the avenues landscaped with greatest beauty, wealth, distinction and pres- tige, which it considers most honorable for mo- torists to view fleetingly from a distance as they speed by. It has denied them and itself the facilities and government-supported institutional means of re- ceiving and creatively adapting-to make more socially inclusive and democratic as well as more technologically sophisticated-the rich cultural and practical scientific traditions, education, ap- preciation, understanding and consciousness of the inter-related humane, aesthetic, ethical, sen- sual, spiritual, and intellectual theory and prac- tice of critical aspects of important human ac- tivity including but not limited to playing, rest- ing, socializing, talking, watching, walking, shop- ping, selling, cooking, sitting, contemplating, as well as the disciplines of economics, planning, administration, sociology, language, accounting, child development, gerontology, medicine, law, religions, commerce, geography, politics, anthro- pology, psychology, natural sciences, journalism, history, philosophy, literature, design, architec- ture, performing and visual arts, crafts and not least engineering, that are essential to creating and enjoying the infrastructure required for a free,
  
WALK Austin 77 democratic and civilized community in a modern urban environment-streets for people. It allows them access to shopping, worship, busi- ness, dining, entertainment, schools and govern- ment buildings but only through inconvenient sub- ordinate means, claiming design aesthetics (such as broad lawns and parking lots dotted with ex- otic plants suited to golf-courses or hothouses) and demands of safety and efficiency of traffic flow as authority for their exclusion from many roadways and entrances off parking lots, result- ing in long unsheltered walks from transit stops to building entrances or along roadways. It has created a false public sentiment, by giving to the world a different code of morals for them and people in vehicles and by which moral delin- quencies which exclude from streets and endan- ger pedestrians are not only tolerated but deemed of little account. It has usurped the prerogative of God, claiming it as its right to assign for them a sphere of action, when that belongs to their consciences and their God. It has endeavored, in every way that it could to destroy the confidence of people who walk in their own powers, to lessen their self-respect, and to make them willing to lead a polluting, expensive, isolated, vehicle-dependent and abject life or walk and roll in misery, danger and fear. Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of-tempo- rarily at least at one time or another-all the people of the city, their social and physical degradation, in view of the un- just laws above mentioned, and because pedestrians do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have full, immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as human beings and as citizens of these

Order your copy now - from the publisher, from abebooks.com or from amazon.com

In Association with Amazon.com

 

© 2004 The Buckmaster Institute, Inc. All rights reserved.