A World For Walking
What should the primary form of transportation be on Mars?
“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk... If one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.”—Søren Kierkegaard
What should the primary form of transportation be on Mars?
In a word: walking!
This is because:
Cities and towns are fundamentally places for people.
Walking is the primary mode of transportation for people.
Therefore the primary form of transportation on Mars should be walking.
It may seem obvious to say that cities and towns are places for people, but in fact, the majority of cities and towns built the past few decades have been designed for cars, not people! Most Americans need an automobile to carry out their daily tasks, and this is increasingly the case in other countries, too. We may consider this normal, but there is no inherent reason our cities must be designed this way. Car-centric cities are an anomaly in history, and we need not export them to Mars. Instead, we should build people-centric cities and towns there, where walking is the main way to get around.
This is not to say there should be no cars, or trains, or planes, or blimps (!), on Mars. In fact, I think these should be utilized. What I am proposing in this essay is simply that we design our built environment so that it prioritizes human scaled methods of transportation over less human scaled methods. We should use forms of travel removed from the pace and scale of human locomotion only when human scaled modes are unfeasible. We may refer to this as The Radial Principle Of Transport. Using this idea, we might plan our cities such that walking and biking are the modes of travel within a city, while trains are used to travel between cities, and cars are used to travel in the countryside. Cities like Venice, Italy, in fact, already practice this. People can drive to Venice, but the city itself is car-free. Travelers and residents simply park outside the city and walk in. People love places like Venice, but we no longer actually build places like it any more. There is no reason why we cannot again, either on Mars or Earth.
There are a few really important things cities and towns must “get right” from their very beginning if they are to most fully thrive. We have discussed a few of these elsewhere. In The Floating City Of Reef, we explored the importance of borders for a city. In The Tallest Building On Mars, we discussed the outsized impact of a city’s tallest building. In this essay, I believe we are discussing one more of these foundational factors. The primary mode of transportation in a place sets the tone for who and what the place is for. If driving is the primary form of travel, then the city is fundamentally for cars. And in a car-centric city, the population will always feel some sense of displacement, as the people literally live in a place not built for them! This is avoided if from the outset a city chooses to be people-centric.
Walking is the most human form of transport. It is the most human-paced and the most human-sized. It fosters silence, wonder, and even joy in the walker. It reminds us we are incarnate creatures meandering through a physical world. It encourages spontaneous interactions with strangers and neighbors. It allows one to most truly know a place—nooks, crannies, and all. And when one more deeply knows a place, one is all the more likely to wish to take care of it and steward it for years to come. If Mars is first and foremost a world for walking, then, I suspect a very good world it will be.
And maybe Earth can become a world for walking again, too? Even if just one street at a time!
Something to ponder!