Most of my walks are in the suburbs these days, which makes sense given the title of this blog, but when I commuted downtown, a fair number of my forays were in the city. This allowed for more constant comparisons between the urban and suburban stroll.

One of the major differences is that in the city we walk to get somewhere, but in the suburbs we walk to walk — because there are few errands we can run on shank’s mare. For that reason, the long-distance suburban walker, the one who dares hoof it along a major road, can be suspect. This is true for people of all races. 

In his book The Lost Art of Walking, Geoff Nicholson tells the story of a well-dressed man stopped by a sheriff’s patrol car on the one-mile walk to his office in Los Angeles County.  It was on “a completely empty stretch of suburban sidewalk, at midday,” the man explained, and he was dressed in a coat and tie when he was ordered to identify himself and explain where he was going. “As a pedestrian,” the man said, “I was suspect.”

According to his definition (minus the coat and tie), I’m suspect, too.