It’s Not the City — It’s the Cars

A world built for automobiles is stressful

Antonia Malchik
5 min readJun 24, 2022
Crowded pedestrian crossing, people walking toward and away from the viewer. Backdrop of shop corner and wide city sidewalk. Looks cold and a bit windy — people are wearing hats and scarves.
Photo: Vlad Hilitanu / Unsplash

There’s an intersection in my small Montana town that is an absolute nightmare. It’s where a busy highway crawls into downtown and makes a hard 90-degree bend. All four incoming roads coming into the intersection have a left- and/or right-turn lane. Trying to cross this intersection as a pedestrian or cyclist from any direction feels — and is — risky, every single time. And not only is it in the middle of a compact, walkable tourist town with a lot of pedestrian traffic during the summer, this particular intersection is directly in front of the middle school. It’s the main route home, to the playground, and to after-school activities for many kids.

It feels so dangerous — and is so dangerous — that many kids, including my own, simply refuse to use it, taking a longer route with less traffic and a crossing guard farther up the road.

When I came across a Psychology Today article declaring that urban settings aren’t necessarily more exhausting than natural ones, I thought instantly of this intersection. Not to be too damning either of the article (which came with a lot of caveats) or the study it was based on, but the whole premise is absurd. In order to gauge stress levels, the researchers had participants come to a controlled environment and walk toward pictures of

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Antonia Malchik
Antonia Malchik

Written by Antonia Malchik

Antonia Malchik is the author of A Walking Life: Reclaiming Our Health and Our Freedom One Step at a Time; walking, tech, community, and embodiment.

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