Walking In The Late 1800s

Walking is a natural task that we must take part in everyday. Before cars were invented in the late 1800’s, our own two feet was the main source of transportation. Since cars and other uses of transportation have evolved, walking has slowly diminished over the years. For the most part, we have brought this problem on ourselves. With everyday construction of new neighborhoods, cities, highways, and roads, we are generating them to be less walker friendly. In today’s world, walking in certain public places is considered dangerous. “A friend of mine told me recently that a few years ago, when she lived in Mississippi, she was stopped by police constantly simply because she preferred to walk to work” (aeon). This is a good representation of how …show more content…
The article says, “In most other places, walking became both boring and difficult” (aeon). Not only do we have cars, motorcycles, bikes and other types of modern day transportation to ride that helps us get around, but we now have smaller uses of transportation. For instance, we now have Hoverboards, which are small boards that consist of a wheel on each side. The person’s balance determines the direction of which way they move. The creation of products such as ones like this is what has made walking viewed as unnecessary. No one wants to walk when they have the option to use machinery. When it comes to being more convenient, a car ride to a certain destination would most likely be picked over the option of walking by anyone. Transportation is also a lot more time efficient then walking. When someone needs to get to a destination, a car or motorized vehicle would benefit them more than walking. No matter how close or far something is, most anyone would prefer to ride instead of walk. There are a lot of small reasons that give people these opinions. For instance, the weather may be one. If it is really hot outside, a car with air conditioning would be a much more pleasurable option than walking in the heat. Or if it was pouring rain and storming outside, it would actually be much safer choice to ride in a car than to …show more content…
Driving being so popular and natural has caused there to be rules for pedestrians. The article says, “For the crime of walking three tired, hungry children home in the most efficient way possible, Nelson faced more jail time than the man who killed her son” (aeon). Nelson was charged with this crime just because she did not walk across the designated walkway on the road. Given Nelson’s situation, she most likely chose the safer way, rather then walking further down the street to cross the walkway at that time of the night. The crisis here is that with the way the world has evolved, it has forced walking, one of the most natural things to do in life, to be almost “abnormal”. In other words, if driving was not such a normal task in today’s world, then we would not have rules for walkers that would put our people in situations such as