He wants to reclaim towns for pedestrians
Dan Burden is playing in traffic. The lanky 50-something scurries into the busy main street of this western New York village, unfurling a metal tape measure as he goes. He gets a quick measurement of the distance from the curb to the double yellow line, then retreats to the sidewalk.
"Twenty-two feet," he says. "Plenty of room for a bike lane."
Mr. Burden is a guest here, invited by a group of citizens who want his advice on how to make their town a better place to walk and bicycle.
That's no mean feat. Americans now use automobiles for more than 90 percent of their daily trips. An average person travels more than 9,000 miles a year by car, compared with less than 4,000 miles four decades ago. The average driver spends 443 hours a year behind the wheel.
The result of this automotive addiction: a world where children are sometimes bused 300 feet to school because they can't safely cross eight-lane suburban boulevards. Two-hour commutes on clogged highways. Quaint main streets forsaken for windowless hulks set along acres of asphalt.
"America is out of sync with its values," Burden tells 100 people who have gathered for a slide presentation in a school cafeteria. "We say we're for kids. We say we're for safety. We say we're for families. And we build this ..." A slide comes up of a woman pushing a stroller along the shoulder of a busy road, a toddler with her walking inches from the traffic.
Children and the elderly suffer most when the automobile conquers a town, Burden says. In a car-dominated landscape, those who can't or won't drive suffer impaired mobility, recreation, and peace of mind.
But the damage can be repaired, he says. Our towns and cities can be refashioned into places where children bike to school and their parents walk to work, where picking up a gallon of milk doesn't have to burn a pint of gasoline.
Burden is seven years into a decade-long road show dedicated to spreading the word, like a postmodern Johnny Appleseed who plants ideas instead of seeds. In 1996 he set up Walkable Communities Inc., a nonprofit business that offers planning, traffic management, and community design. He travels 350 days a year - ironically, often by automobile - and vows to keep moving until 2006. So far he has visited 1,300 communities.
This isn't the first time Burden has hit the road in the name of nonmotorized transportation. In 1971, he and his wife embarked on Hemistour, a National Geographic-sponsored bicycle expedition from Alaska to Argentina. They rode with one other couple, Greg and June Siple.
The Burdens had to drop out 18 months into the trip when Dan became ill in southern Mexico. But by then Burden and Greg Siple had conceived another grand adventure, a mass transcontinental ride to celebrate America's bicentennial. More than 4,000 people participated in what organizers called Bikecentennial.
Burden settled down some after that, going to work for the federal Department of Transportation and later as Florida's bicycle and pedestrian coordinator. But he says a vacation to Australia in 1980 helped him realize that highways and shopping malls have led America astray.
"I started to walk the streets and wander through the villages and began to realize that Australia, every town I was in, was the America I remembered as a child," he says.
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