I stopped short and held up my hand, my eyes locked on those of the driver of the car fewer than 25 feet from me. He waved me on, but I waved with more force and he nodded and rolled his car past me and into the drive-thru line of McDonald's.
I took a breath, scanned the road again and fast-walked across the parking lot. I made it -- a pedestrian in Northern Virginia on Black Friday.
But Black Friday or not, I walk frequently walk around where I live and for much of the distance I'm not walking on a sidewalk or one of the supposedly numerous walking paths that criss-cross where I live. In fact, as a New Yorker (fresh back from a trip back on this Thanksgiving) I can say that Northern Virginia west of Reston Parkway is not too pedestrian friendly.
I live right in the middle of a holiday shopper's paradise. I've a mall with a Nordstrom's and Sears (high brow and low brow), a Best Buy, Target, Marshalls -- you get the idea. There's nothing that I or anyone could want to buy that isn't within a mile of each other. But you'd think that the air was toxic or the ground ready to swallow a person if a count of the number of people on foot was a measure of safety.
But then the lack of people walking is a sign of just how dangerous it is to literally step out of your house around here. I'm living in car-land. People take their cars to the grocery store and then walk to their vehicle only to drive it a few hundred yards to the coffee shop. No wonder we've an obesity epidemic: walking is dangerous.
When the driver and I exchanged hand signs earlier today, I was on my way back from the Dulles Town Center Mall. I had successfully crossed Route 7 and scampered down a little hill the ringed the Sunoco station on Pidgeon Hill Drive. I waited for a car to pass in the McD's parking lot, and then stepped out. Whoa! The driver spun in from the right nearly on two wheels, but not so fast that he couldn't stop or that I couldn't freeze like an eight year old boy playing a school-yard game.
From about two hundred yards from the light at Dulles Crossing until I reached the Safeway in the shopping plaza -- roughly half a mile -- I didn't step foot on a sidewalk. I hiked over grass walked on so frequently that a trail was visible until I reached Route 7, dashed across at the light and then hugged the shoulder until I reached the little hill at Sunoco.
Even here in a plaza with a McDonald's, Starbucks, Safeway and various strip-mall shops there were no sidewalks. Everyone drives. No one walks. Well, at least no one for more than a few feet. Around here, the only people who walk any distance whatsoever have a dog on a leash and stroll the paths, or appear to be foreign born and wear the work clothes of landscapers. No wonder if I'm walking it surprises drivers so much.
But I like walking and riding my bike (which is a whole other story, believe me!), but doing either one appears to be like holding a winning lottery ticket -- totally unexpected.
Something has to change. We have to somehow get out of our cars and on our feet in enough numbers so that a pedestrian is not the novelty that he is now and that he is safer.
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