I've also had the experience of getting "suspicious looks" while walking in suburbia.
I was once stopped and questioned by a police cruiser because I was walking on a well lit street at night in my Ohio hometown. The officer was reluctant to accept that anyone would walk for the sake of walking - and yes, I've read "The Pedestrian" by Ray Bradbury [1]. Truth can be as strange as fiction.
After living in NYC for 10 years, walking has become such a natural part of life that I completely forgot how unusual it was in suburban Ohio.
I can't help but think that the lack of walking goes beyond negative health effects; I feel like it erodes civil society to a certain degree. When you drive door to door, you rarely interact with strangers. Given my experience, I don't think "paranoia" is too harsh of a word to describe what car-focused settlement patterns can do to people.
I was once stopped and questioned by a police cruiser because I was walking on a well lit street at night in my Ohio hometown. The officer was reluctant to accept that anyone would walk for the sake of walking - and yes, I've read "The Pedestrian" by Ray Bradbury [1]. Truth can be as strange as fiction.
After living in NYC for 10 years, walking has become such a natural part of life that I completely forgot how unusual it was in suburban Ohio.
I can't help but think that the lack of walking goes beyond negative health effects; I feel like it erodes civil society to a certain degree. When you drive door to door, you rarely interact with strangers. Given my experience, I don't think "paranoia" is too harsh of a word to describe what car-focused settlement patterns can do to people.
[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pedestrian
EDIT: not sure if "The Pedestrian" is in the public domain, so linking to wikipedia instead of directly to a PDF