Coronavirus cities: Advice on walking
This post originally published on my newsletter, City & County. You can subscribe here.
The City of Somerville’s Coronavirus email update for 28 March 2020 noted:
If you get to a location and it’s too crowded to stay at a safe distance, go somewhere else. We have 250 miles of sidewalk in the City and many quiet side streets. Try walking on those instead.
This advice prodded me to reflect on my strategies for taking walks during this pandemic. What follows is advice on how to go on long urban walks during, in my case, Massachusetts’s Stay at Home Order for lessening the Coronavirus outbreak (flattening the curve as we all say).
+Pack everything you might need, because stopping at a shop to pick up a bottle of water is out, as is using that water fountain in the park. In fact, avoid the park altogether, because the sun is out so inevitably people will be gathering there. Many of those people will not be practicing safe social distancing, among each other and their dogs. Also and importantly, remember to use the bathroom before you leave, because there is nowhere to stop for a toilet break: the public restrooms are locked and the cafe is closed.
+Observe your best practices for getting out of the house with a disinfecting wipe in gloved hand, using it to open the door and clean off light switches as you descent the stairs. Peel off the glove with wipe in hand, ball up this waste and look for a street-side trash can with lid open, or (bonus!) use the hole that the neighborhood rats have chewed in the hinged lid of a trash can to dispose of this wad of potential infection.
+Now that you are outdoors, don’t touch anything with your hands. Not the crosswalk signal, nothing! Don’t worry, you should not have to wait to cross that typically-busy street, because there is not very much traffic these days. Remember to try to not touch your face. Keep trying to remember that.
+Commercial corridors will inevitably have higher foot traffic with shoppers going in and out of grocery stores and pharmacies. Consider wandering through residential neighborhoods or industrial areas and other fringe areas where pedestrians are less common.
+Fellow walker approaching? Get in the street and use the overabundance of parked cars (because no one is driving to work) to act as your six-foot virus buffer. Is it easier to just cross to the other side of the street and keep walking over there? Do so. It is a good idea to hold off on making that phone call or listening to that podcast. You want all your senses, including hearing, ready in case you need to get out of the way of others.
+Thinking about pulling out your smartphone to snap a picture for social media? Ask yourself if the image is really worth having to clean your phone with one of your rapidly diminishing supply of wipes when you get home. In fact, maybe just leave the phone at home. You’ll be back out on these same streets tomorrow, and the spring flowers will be blooming and maybe the sky will be blue and the sunlight streaming in at an angle that makes the picture that much better.
+However, these are unprecedented times, and you should probably document your days with words and images, whether photographs, videos, sound recordings, drawings, or other media. Empty streets are eerie and unique: this is not what the city should look like and feel like, but it is certainly the case now. Whatever comes next, it will not be a return to “normal” and so having a way to remember these days-weeks-months-years will be important and valuable. Maybe you can even get some photos that resemble Eugene Atget’s nineteenth century Paris, drained of bodies and movement because of the extremely slow shutter speed. Try your hand at some re-photography, mining the library’s local history resources and online photo archive for old images of streets and landmarks.
+In one of his recent weekly newsletters, avid walker Craig Mod encouraged us to find a new street to travel down every day as a way to stay occupied.
Have set a rule: Every day a new street, a new path, a new alley. Just one, in the ’hood. Get out, do the walk, do the run, add 1% of change to the routine and see what you find.
This advice squares with City of Somerville’s recommendation to stick to quiet side streets. Assuming you have a printer, print out a map of your neighborhood and start marking off the streets you have not passed down. No printer? Load your favorite map app, find some blank paper, and draw out a sketch map of your neighborhood. Get creative! Find an old, out of date map of your city and navigate by that. Follow the remnant traces of an old canal, or the roads that the post-war freeway construction eliminated.
+Once you have that map sorted, determine out what routes you want to take. Make loops of varying length, ideally with points where you could adjust and head home early: a thirty minute loop, a sixty, and so on. Also remember you could do your loops twice, or fold them together, allowing you to stay closer to home should you need to stop. Given that you will be walking variations of the same route once or twice a day for the foreseeable future, find things to pay attention to: the residential architecture of the neighborhood, the flowers opening and leaves unfurling, or perhaps the return of urban nature into the area, for instance the hawks overhead, their cries audible because of the decrease in ambient noise, or the return of coyotes to the city, in particular from dusk to dawn.
+Speaking of dusk to dawn, consider planning walks at off-peak times when there will be less people out and about. Especially as the weather across the Northern Hemisphere improves in the coming months, people will inevitably be drawn outdoors in greater numbers. So, wake up early and get out for the sunrise or grab a flashlight and take a walk at night. Rainy days are also good for social distancing walks. You may get wet, but you will have the sidewalks to yourself.
+Once you return home, take your shoes off outside your front door and leave them there, wash your hands then wash them again, change your outfit and isolate the clothes you were wearing outside, just to be safe. Get some water and a snack, and then go look out the window and think about when you will next leave the house.
