by Charles H. Crawford
In an era of superhighways, supermarkets, information that travels at the speed of light, Game Boys, Super Bowls and movies showing in living rooms and family rooms on 60-inch screens with surround sound, why are so many still searching for a place where they can live? Has something gone terribly wrong? If so, what does ACB have to do with it?
Think about the definition of an “ideal” neighborhood for a blind person and then think about the same definition for a person with sight. Is there much difference? Would a sighted person enjoy a mixed-use development where one could walk just a couple of blocks to get to the store? Would people who can see, and drive, like to see their kids go a block or two and find the soccer or baseball field, instead of having to get in the car and drive them off to the playing fields three miles down the highway? Wouldn’t sighted people enjoy crossing narrower streets instead of taking their lives in their hands as they rush to cross six lanes of speeding traffic? Wouldn’t these same folks like the notion of walking down the sidewalk to a variety store and meeting friends and neighbors they actually know along the way? Wouldn’t all of us love to live in a place where we could let our children out of doors without even the smallest fear? Why in a nation so rich are we even discussing such a fundamental expectation?
As I have worked to improve pedestrian safety, I have discovered, to my dismay, that our nation seems to be slowly sinking into a mess of urban sprawl that may have once promised better living, but now delivers polluted skies, deadly streets, and generations of Americans who are slowly losing the connections to one another that we once took for granted. Now we hear footsteps and wonder if there is danger. Now we lock ourselves in our cars and our houses or apartments, because there is just nowhere to walk to anymore. Can we change this? Yes, we can. ACB is taking on a leadership role in a struggle that will not only help blind folks, but in the grand scheme of things, lead the way for everyone.
There are a whole set of values that are associated with pedestrian safety. We begin to perceive a world beyond the borders of our little islands set between large highways. We think about people walking in the open air rather than cramped behind the windshields of their cars and sports utility vehicles. Our perspectives widen even as we begin to think of the freedom and possibilities in a world where we no longer are prisoners to cars and the accommodations they demand! For example, we all protect one another because we care.
There is a new movement in America. It is called livable communities and it is catching on. ACB has rightfully placed the concept of pedestrian safety within that model of communities where we can really live. We must promote safe street crossings to sidewalks and sidewalks to houses and stores and churches and neighbors. We must connect the neighbors to places for kids and schools and family outings. We must connect these places to ourselves and realize that our first steps toward pedestrian safety have begun a journey where we as a blindness community are pointing the way to a place where a force greater than all of our technology and our money and our power lives and flourishes. We are making a conscious, and an increasingly popular, decision to plan communities where we can live, and not try to live anymore in communities that have names but no souls.
So, go get a copy of the pedestrian safety handbook. Now begin to imagine the world we can have if we only take those first steps without fear and knowing that each step brings us all closer as a people, as a nation, and as communities alive in the richness of all our members. What are you waiting for? Call your ACB chapter president and let’s get busy!