I had an apartment in a medium-sized Texas city some years ago. I specifically got the apartment because it was walking distance to my work. Several months later, I was stopped by a man while walking through the gate, and told I couldn't do that, it would damage the gate. Wtf? He didn't identify himself, and I had no idea who he was, so I continued.
A few days later, after walking through the gate, the property manager exited the office, having obviously been watching through the blinds, and told me I couldn't walk through the gate, it would damage it. The man was with her, and turned out to be the maintenance man.
The conversation went something like this:
"You can't walk through the gate, you'll damage it."
"Uh, it really won't."
"Yes it will."
"Are you an engineer?"
"No. It will damage the gate."
"Uhh, could I get the code for the pedestrian gate next to it, then? I can leave through that gate, but I can't get in."
"No, that's for the condo residents only."
"Uhh, you mean the more expensive apartments on the other side? Condominiums are owned by their residents."
"They're condos that are rented. Only the condo tenants get the gate code."
"Uhh...okay then. Well, you can legally discriminate against people who ambulate, I guess, it's not a protected class."
"We don't discriminate against anyone."
"Riight. You'll have my intent to vacate tomorrow."
You literally could not live in this apartment complex and walk from it. And apparently I'm the only one who ever had an issue with that. The whole experience was surreal. I left and bought a house. I wasn't about to take them to court. Humans don't win against corporations in Texas. So ist das Leben.
I could rage against gated communities as a whole for so long (despite living in one right now...long story...) but if your comment doesn't sum up the attitude of people who live in these types of places then I don't know what does.
Is jaywalking a crime anywhere but in LA and Germany? I can't say that I've ever seen any law enforcement take it seriously anywhere except those two places.
Personally, I love walking. When I lived close, I'd walk to work (roughly a mile) through the most hellish cold if that's what the weather decided to give me that day. Sadly, I moved to the suburbs last year, and my walking has decreased dramatically since then (and inversely correlates with my weight--go figure!). I can't say that I miss living in Detroit, but that one particular aspect of it really gets me down. I'd like to move back to a city in the future, but just not that one.
Funny story time. There is a guy in our circle of friends who we all consider a saint. He doesn't drink or smoke, he always goes out of his way to help others, he goes to church every Sunday, all around he's a nice, upstanding guy. About a year back a bunch of us were hanging out around a park and lost track of time and try as we might to hustle out, we were unable to get out before sundown. When we got back to our cars, lo and behold there was a cop waiting for us, ticket book in hand. He took all of our IDs to write out tickets and gave them back to us one by one, talking to our friend the saint dead last. He said "Your friends are all free to go, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to arrest you." We all stood there gobsmacked as we watched our friend get handcuffed and put in the back of the cruiser. Turns out, he had a bench warrant for his arrest for failure to pay a ticket for jay walking. A few hours later, and after a huge check written out by his very unhappy wife, he was a free man again. To this day, we joke about how the nicest one out of all of us is the only one with a record.
My old roommate got a $100 ticket for jaywalking in Vancouver a few years back.
Hong Kong has some occaisional crackdowns, but besides that I can't think of any country off the top of my head.
Personally, I'm lucky enough to have months on end where I don't need a car. Walking / biking and the occasional train or tram is much easier.
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I'd love to live in a place where everything was within walking distance, but I live in the suburbs.
The closest grocery store to me is about 4 miles, but completely sidewalked. My school is about 3 miles away, but there's no sidewalk and requires walking along one of the worst roads in my area (windy road with multiple housing developments attached to it). If I want to catch a bus, the nearest stop, I'm pretty sure the nearest stop is at my grocery store.
Like the article said - much of the country doesn't have the infrastructure, or planning, to really rely on walking. If I want fast food, or need something from the store, that's over an hour of walking each way - often in the heat or rain. However, doing any of those in a car would take maybe 20 minutes total. If I had to walk for everything, most simple tasks would become all day things. I couldn't even get a job, because the nearest business is 20-30 minutes away, and up a huge hill.
Bicycles aren't preferable, either. I live in a valley, so any place I want to go requires riding up a decently steep hill for about a mile. Then, I have to decide to either put others at risk by riding down the sidewalk (the number of times I've come across people walking and not paying attention to anything around them is high), or put my life at risk and hold up traffic by riding on the congested neighborhood roads that go everywhere. Still, the store is half an hour away, and many places are still dangerous to even think about going to. On top of that, the abundance of hills in my area are going to make me arrive hot and sweaty.
I might be a special case, but there's many Americans that are in the same situation. For us to rely on our own biological transportation, even with the assistance of mass transit, is still time consuming, and often dangerous. The bad part is - it's not going to change for us. Like the article said, it's hard to build walking paths after roads have been put down and buildings and infrastructure have been built around them. On top of that, the paving of the paths would be expensive, and the cost would rise in places where the terrain is difficult to build (There's roads around here that would require a lot of work to have a surface next to them viable for a sidewalk). The expansion of public transportation would be very costly, and there probably wouldn't be that much of a demand for it in places where it didn't exist before. People have already bought cars to get around, and aren't going to give them up in favor of a bus that they have to wait for and share with people.
I think the illusion to Orwell was really strange. We're not being forbidden to walk, it's just not viable for many people. There's no authoritarian ruling against it, there's just no sidewalks.
Oh how true this is! My town, city, and state are not destined for walking but oh how I would love to take off walking or even bicycling everywhere I want or need to go. There isn't really anything stopping me beside the requirement of a bicycle in that case but it's just not ingrained, habit, or something I really even think of doing.
Everything where I live is 1/4 mile apart +/-, but could technically be walked but would take more time and effort.
I should also say that I had no idea what Aeon Magazine was and it's pretty cool.
I find this article about Aeon Magazine quite interesting..
https://www.jboy.space/log/ssrc-digital-media-reflection.html
The CEO of Aeon Magazines father is one of the richest people in Australia being a head of a hedge fund..
I don't follow a lot of domains on Hubski but aeon is one of the ones I follow.