17 ms·

While taking a walk near downtown Austin, TX, a police car stopped next to me and the officers started asking weird questions. Including if I know where I am at

• nonameiguess 2y ago
  I've been seeing this top comment for days now as this thread seems to never die and I can't help but finally say something because this and associated similar comments are utterly bizarre to me. I've lived in Texas about 15 years now, first at Fort Hood, spending quite a bit of time in Austin, and I've lived in Dallas for the past decade. I live very near downtown, so there's that, but I walk all over the place and always have. I didn't even have a car for about 6 years and only finally bought one because I was going through foster care licensing and you needed to have the ability to drive a kid somewhere without relying on external assistance. Even at 3 AM, I'm not the only person out walking. I have never once been stopped by police. I go through "dangerous" neighborhood, through places near homeless encampments. I tweaked my groin while running a few weeks ago when I was 8 miles from my house and walked all the way back from Highland Park, though Uptown, Downtown, and the Cedars to get back to my house. To be clear, walking in Dallas sucks. Sidewalks randomly end. There is construction everywhere. Oak Lawn this morning had both sidewalks closed, each with a sign saying to use the other sidewalk. Drivers pay absolutely no attention and never look for pedestrians. But it is nonetheless possible and feasible to walk around and no one has ever looked at me funny for doing it. Yes, it is also often triple digit fahrenheit heat in the afternoons, but that is well within the human survivable zone, and as long as you aren't going somewhere that you can't be covered in sweat, you'll be fine. Also, I live about two miles from the main museum district in Dallas, and I walk whenever I go to a museum, and the streets there are completely filled with pedestrians. Even if you drive from out of the area, you're still not gonna park right next to the entrance. Some have their own parking lots. Some don't. The parks in the area do not. Plenty of drivers still park pretty far away. So it's particularly weird that someone would stop you on your way to a museum.
• akira2501 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • RichEO 2y ago
    > you're in a city, what did you expect? If you want to spend time walking outside drive to one of the many National Parks Is this a joke? I hope this is a joke and I’ve misunderstood it. Cities are not synonymous with cars. There are lots of walkable cities in the world. Driving to a place where you can walk is a very strange inversion of the norm.
    • thaumasiotes 2y ago
      > Driving to a place where you can walk is a very strange inversion of the norm. There's no way for that to be true; driving to a place where you can walk is a possibility. Walking to a place where you can drive would be useless, because you wouldn't have a car there.
      • zimpenfish 2y ago
        > Walking to a place where you can drive would be useless You could walk to a vehicle rental shop or (eg London with Zipcar) walk to where a vehicle you can rent is parked. But not a normal situation, definitely.
        • thaumasiotes 2y ago
          > or (eg London with Zipcar) walk to where a vehicle you can rent is parked. I never got Zipcar. They made themselves completely pointless by charging you for time when you didn't need the car, inflating what appeared to be reasonable fees into ludicrous overcharges. If I want to visit my family 90 minutes away over the weekend, I might pay for three hours of car rental. I'm obviously not going to pay for 48 hours of car rental. Who exactly is using Zipcar? Where did the model "like long-term car rental, but we'll lie about it" come from?
          • 2y ago
• DontchaKnowit 2y ago
  You sure the officers werent just being friendly cause you looked like a tourist who was lost? I've never been, but from what I understand Austin (esp downtown) is one of the more walkable cities in Texas.
• psunavy03 2y ago
  This is not uniquely an American thing. Go to the Middle East in summer.
  • HPsquared 2y ago
    Portable wearable air conditioning and sun protection, that's what you'd need to make it comfortable. Maybe like a robotic exoskeleton, we can't be far from making that affordable.
    • 0_____0 2y ago
      cars are just suburban power armor
    • jpadkins 2y ago
      we can also have wheels to make it energy efficient. We can call it "the mobile" or maybe the auto-mobile.
      • jodrellblank 2y ago
        Wheels might make it energy efficient but engines powered by oil from deep under the Gulf of Mexico shipped to refineries, then shipped hundreds of miles to gas stations, then people driving a ton or two of steel and plastic and rubber to the gas station so they can “efficiently” get one person 4 miles to a shop isn’t so efficient. A bicycle on flat asphalt is more efficient than a person despite person+bike moving more total mass; but still the cost of mining iron ore, making steel, making a bike for every customer, compared to just building the store and the homes close enough to walk and not doing any of that… Energy.gov says “In 2021, 52% of all trips, including all modes of transportation, were less than three miles, with 28% of trips less than one mile”, it’s daft either way that people want to use a car for such short distances or that urban spaces are designed so that things are relatively very close but juuuust too far for convenience.
    • pshc 2y ago
      Singapore has covered walkways everywhere to beat the heat. Also I would love to see more covered bikeways.
• i_am_proteus 2y ago
  How close were you to downtown Austin? Were you walking on the side of a freeway? Except for the very hottest of summer days, I see a lot of pedestrians in downtown Austin.
  • giaour 2y ago
    > Except for the very hottest of summer days, I see a lot of pedestrians in downtown Austin. I don't know if this is true of Austin, but trying to convince people to get off the street in the afternoon can be part of the city's heat management plan in some parts of Texas.
• julienchastang 2y ago
  Strange. I have been to Austin a number of times for work and I find the city to be very walkable. I also enjoy the riverfront parks and pay a visit to SRV (may he rest in peace). I stay in downtown or at UT so I don't really know what it is like beyond there. I've also used their b-cycle system with great success. In addition, I remember their public transport system to be decent for an American city. That's how I get to the airport for something like $1 from downtown.
  • tialaramex 2y ago
    I was in Austin for work in the 1990s and there was a mall, which I could see from my hotel so I figured I'll just walk to the mall. Nope. I think either an older colleague (I was not old enough to rent a car, this is a long time ago) ferried me across or maybe the hotel took pity and sent me in their minibus ? There was no practical way to walk that short distance, the infrastructure is designed only for cars. I mainly remember that mall because I found a (possibly mislabelled) copy of the version of Tori Amos' "Under The Pink" which is actually 2CDs, so "More Pink" is inside the case too but it was the same price as the regular album, and that was an amazing bargain for teenage me. But yeah, it was staggering to me that these Americans just expected to drive everywhere. I have grown up in an English village where I walked everywhere, to school, to the shops. to a friend's house, everywhere. I guess I was old enough to realise that most English villages aren't also served by the London Underground, but the choice to build only car infrastructure seemed very strange indeed.
  • maerF0x0 2y ago
    There are places in Austin where you can go for pleasure/scenic walks. (eg think the green belts). But it's hard to use walking for utility in Austin. Not to mention socially you'll consistently be invited to places >5 miles away and the presumption is you have a car and you'll all drive separate.
  • shermozle 2y ago
    The hire bikes are great but if you don't have a North American phone number you can't sign up in their app! (I relied on a friendly stranger who offered her phone number for the confirmation code.) Great city to ride around! Surprisingly good facilities.
• ysofunny 2y ago
  if there was a dictionary of "american urbanism" they would define humans as having four wheels rather than two legs they really do act like it whenever the USA plans a city or a neighborhood. why wouldn't everybody have a car? except we actually have plenty of reasons now that we didn't before
  • jncfhnb 2y ago
    You’re confusing yourself with suburbs. Most American cities are highly walkable. Safety is the limiting factor.
    • noodlesUK 2y ago
      Having cities arranged on grids with huge wide roads is generally a recipe for non-walkable environments. If you are having to wait ages for a light to change every time you go from one block to the next, you lose much of the efficiency of walking.
      • autoexec 2y ago
        > Having cities arranged on grids with huge wide roads is generally a recipe for non-walkable environments. There's no problem with grids or wide roads as long as there is infrastructure in place for pedestrians. Bridges can allow people to cross over wide streets/traffic without having to wait for a light for example. Tunnels can be an option as well. Grids can really help a city be more walkable since it becomes dead simple to navigate and you aren't wasting time on long winding roads or labyrinthine paths which increase the distance between two points and make it easier to get lost.
        • Moldoteck 2y ago
          Grids are better than culdesac but worse than randomness for a human brain so that it would be interesting to walk there. Wide roads aren't good for walkability in any sense: even if we ignore huge noise and pollution created by lots of cars, wide roads are more dangerous to cross and since it's wide you as a pedestrian need to walk more on non pedestrian infra to get to points of interest. Walkability isn't just about being able to walk
• cheeseomlit 2y ago
  Had a somewhat similar experience in Houston (minus police), which seems to be a city whose infrastructure is comprised of one 9000-lane monstrosity of a freeway. I was staying in a hotel right across the street from the office I was working in, maybe a 3 minute walk. A coworker offered to give me a ride each morning, and when I mentioned I could just walk they said 'the only pedestrians around here are homeless people'. So I guess that's their general attitude about walking, which might explain the attention from police.
  • hammock 2y ago
    I had a similar experience in Mexico City, except it wasn't a cop who stopped me, it was a friendly civilian driving by, and they asked if I was confused because they had observed two men stalking me from 3 blocks back for a while who were likely to jump me. I don't think anyone stopping to genuinely help is a "bad" thing, or robs one of their dignity. If you do, maybe that is a comment on your internal worldview instead of on that of the person stopping. Dense cities where passersby ignore you wantonly are decried as impersonal, lacking community, etc and now we are saying we WANT MORE of that? That it brings DIGNITY?
    • 6177c40f 2y ago
      I don't understand what you're arguing. It seems like you're saying you'd rather have a city where cops and concerned citizens stop to ask if you're confused than a dense, walkable city? I also don't understand how you got that dense, walkable cities would be someplace "where passersby ignore you wantonly".
      • hammock 2y ago
        Cities used to be filled with tight knit communities in neighborhoods where everyone knew each other. Kids played outside and roamed around and no one cared. Then mass suburbanization happened in the 60s/70s. American cities became high crime places. Everyone became anonymous. No one knew their neighbor. Such is the paradox of modern urban life. Nowhere are you closer physically to your neighbor, but more distant socially. The 5 acre farms outside of town all know each other’s grandkids by name. Does a city dweller even know the name of the resident across the hall?
• mtalantikite 2y ago
  I had something similar happen to me in Miami about a decade ago. As a New Yorker I'm just used to walking and taking public transit everywhere. I was down there for some data center work I needed to do out of the NAP of the Americas, and one night I decided to go to see a friend of a friend DJ at some bar in downtown Miami. So I took the free Miami elevated train to a stop near the club (The Vagabond) and started walking over. I get a block into the walk and someone pulls up on a bike and is like "wtf are you doing? are you lost? you should not be walking right now, do you need help?". It was a totally fine walk, maybe 5 minutes at NYC walking speeds, if maybe a bit desolate. The guy proceeded to slowly ride next to me while I walked to make sure I was ok. Ended up buying him a beer in the club and chatting for a while, he just thought it was dangerous to be walking.
  • SoftTalker 2y ago
    Maybe it was a dangerous (i.e. high-crime) area? A lot of areas can look OK but are not someplace you want to be at night especially alone. And if you're from out of town you might not know.
    • ryandrake 2y ago
      Similar happened to me. I was at The Oaks Card Club on the border of Emeryville and West Oakland. I needed to get to BART, and it was just a few blocks on one street, so I thought I'd just walk. About half way down, a taxi driver actually pulled up without me hailing him and said "Man, what the fuck are you doing walking here? Get in and I'll drive you wherever you need to go!" It was either a great sales pitch or I was actually in danger and didn't know it.
      • alephnerd 2y ago
        If you were walking to the West Oakland station, he's absolutely right. You'd be crossing a couple highway on-ramps which aren't the most pedestrian friendly.
      • LorenPechtel 2y ago
        My SF story: Chinatown, near the convention center. My wife wanted me to pick some stuff up while I was there. I had been there by day, seemed perfectly reasonable. I get done with the trade show, head over there near closing time to get what she wanted (perishable, so I left it to the last minute) and coming back I realized the character had changed considerably and it was a place I didn't want to be. I hadn't gotten a car because the hassles of parking made it a negative to me.
• esotericsean 2y ago
  Living in Southern California, I like to go on walks with my family in the evenings or mornings, but I couldn't imagine having to take public transportation or having to walk everywhere. It seems picturesque, but it also sounds terrible in the sense that you can't just get in your car, go some place, park in a parking lot, go shopping, and then head back home, all on your own terms. I visited London a long time ago and the public transportation is amazing and it I did want to walk to see the city, which I did. But I imagine even living there, I would want my own car to be in control of my life. So, visiting a place is good for walking. But living in a place is not. At least that's my experience.
  • ivan_gammel 2y ago
    >But living in a place is not I’m 40+ years old now and have never needed or wanted to have a driving license. I simply hated America when I had to visit and use taxi or someone else’s help to get anywhere. In Berlin even with a child the need of a car is so rare — sometimes it’s even more pleasant to walk an hour to a museum or a club than use public transportation.
    • blobbers 2y ago
      That’s strange coming from someone whose country has the famous autobahn. What if you want to get out into the countryside, where busses and trains don’t go? Don’t you need a license to rent a vehicle?
      • ivan_gammel 2y ago
        > What if you want to get out into the countryside, where busses and trains don’t go? I don’t have any business in such countryside. What would I find there? A good beach on Baltic sea is 15 min walk door-to-water plus 2 hours on express train. The list of tourist attractions and vacation destinations accessible by train, plane and/or taxi within half a day or so is so big here that I cannot imagine going to such inaccessible place. Worst case I will pay a few hundred euro for taxi if such improbable situation occurs.
    • 2y ago
• UncleOxidant 2y ago
  An old roommate moved from the Bay Area to Dallas years ago and on a nice day in the park he decided to lay down on the grass, as he would normally do in the Bay Area. Pretty soon cops arrived.
  • grecy 2y ago
    I’m from Australia, and while visiting NYC the cops got very aggressive because I walked on grass in a park! They also said if I kept throwing a football in Central Park there would be trouble, and yelled at me for lying on a bench in a train station. As a 22 year old kid I was a bit taker aback
  • alexawarrior3 2y ago
    They're just trying to save your from the fire ants.
    • ted_dunning 2y ago
      and the chiggers.
  • hackeraccount 2y ago
    "normally do in the Bay Area" i.e. he was naked as the day he was born. Yeah, that's not gonna fly in Texas.
• fudged71 2y ago
  It's pretty wild. I'm in a very car-centric city in Canada, and there have been days where I drive across the city and not seen a single pedestrian (across multiple types of areas). Usually in the winter, but still a very weird thing to not see people in a city.
  • blobbers 2y ago
    What city?
    • fudged71 2y ago
      Calgary
      • grecy 2y ago
        I walked 35mins to work everyday of the 2 years I lived in Calgary, which got me excited to bike 20 mins to work everyday for 4 years in Whitehorse. Biking in -40 is a lot of fun when you attack big snow drifts in the pitch black at 10am!
      • CHB0403085482 2y ago
        Better than London? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQEHQjGBCPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQEHQjGBCPQ
        • fudged71 2y ago
          Probably about the same
• PsylentKnight 2y ago
  FWIW, I live near downtown Austin, haven't owned a car in over a year, walk/bus everywhere, and have never been questioned by police. I typically see quite a few pedestrians out. As far as Texan cities go it's the most walkable, though it's still not very good.
  • coyotespike 2y ago
    Yes, I've lived here 17 years and see pedestrians most places I go - although to be fair there are many roads where pedestrians don't go (say, the service road alongside 71). Perhaps OP was in such a place. I also did not own a car for years, commuting only by bicycle, and never had a problem. Indeed, Austin's core is only about 5 square miles (the entirety of the East Side to the Greenbelt, Hyde Park down to far South Congress, say). Fairly compact. It is no New York or London but it is walkable and bikeable.
  • IWeldMelons 2y ago
    Austin is way bigger than its small hip core. Most if it is absolute sprawling suburbia. Not any more walkable than Dallas or SA.
• supertrope 2y ago
  97% of Americans' daily trips are done via automobile. Walking, biking, and bus riding tend to be associated with low socioeconomic status. There is heavy policing of low SES populations. In Kaplan, Louisiana it is explicitly illegal to walk at night. https://www.klfy.com/local/vermilion-parish/kaplan-starts-permanent-curfew-against-late-night-walking-and-bike-traffic/ https://www.klfy.com/local/vermilion-parish/kaplan-starts-pe...
  • georgeecollins 2y ago
    I am not a lawyer, but that does not seem like a law that could pass a constitutional test. You can say you have to be in a car to be on a freeway for safety reasons, but you can't ban people from being in a place because they are not in a car because you don't like the people who aren't in cars. From reading the article the intent seems to be that you suspect people who aren't in cars.
    • NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
      > I am not a lawyer, but that does not seem like a law that could pass a constitutional test. Nor am I, but a constitutional test used to cost about $250,000 or so over a decade ago (does inflation affect these things?). For someone who can't afford a car, that's a tough bill to eat.
      • qingcharles 2y ago
        As someone who has litigated a ton of constitutional challenges, you can definitely do it without representation if you want. I would think pretty much anyone on HN is educated enough to figure it out. (Attorney fees being your biggest cost; costs you'd have to swallow are deposition fees and filing fees if you're not indigent). [Usually you can make two separate attacks on these kinds of constitutional cases since most states have their own constitutions that are practically identical to the federal one, so you can sue in both state and federal court separately if you want two tries at it -- this is good if you screw it up the first time and want to use the arguments the defendant fired at you in the first case to bolster your retry] With representation though, I have a current case I finally settled today with the government and my legal counsel ran up a bill that was north of $500K for a very simple constitutional case. His firm swallowed it because it was part of their yearly pro bono requirements.
• maerF0x0 2y ago
  People living in Austin will drive > 10 miles to go for a 3 mile run.
  • cafard 2y ago
    I have known people in Washington, DC, who lived with a quarter mile of a hiker/biker path in Rock Creek Park, and would drive ~7 miles to Fletcher's Boathouse (or 10 to Carderock) to run on the C&O Canal towpath. I confess that I have been one of those people (I didn't live quite there)--but when meeting with friends for a run. My preference was always to lace on the sneakers, walk to the end of the block, and run.
    • maerF0x0 2y ago
      I guess my own biases excuse the idea of driving a good distance for a hike or trail run that are "one offs" (though in aggregate are regular), but the idea of going for a weekly (or multiple times a week) social run seems to be wasteful. In terms of the atmosphere they're equivalent.
• ACABYouknowIt 2y ago
  [flagged]
• mikrotikker 2y ago
  I heard the same from a Scot who visited Texas and decided to go for a 45 minute stroll to his destination. In summer. He regretted it 15mins in and luckily a local stopped and gave him a ride, saying that he could die in this heat (not sure if that was a joke)
  • extraduder_ire 2y ago
    Probably not a joke. Heatstroke is very real. Many underestimate hot weather and don't drink nearly enough water.
  • wkat4242 2y ago
    For a Scot it would be a bit of an extreme change. For a Spaniard it wouldn't. It's important to pace and hydrate oneself and people from hot climates know that because they deal with it all the time.
• AtlasBarfed 2y ago
  Texas is ground zero for the car centric mass psychology. South Florida and the north suburbs of Detroit are #2 and #3 in my direct experience. The south is very well suited to the e-bike. It will probably take the total die off of the boomers before anything really changed though
• mdnahas 2y ago
  I’m a transportation activist in Austin. Where did this happen?
  • kmarc 2y ago
    I think it was around Waterloo park and capitol; I was on my way to the Texas State History Museum. I looked around now on Google Street View, but can't recognize the slight hill I was walking on (it happened around 10y ago). Funnily enough, also street view shows streets with no pedestrians anywhere :-)
• wkat4242 2y ago
  Yeah this is so weird for us. I'm so glad i didn't need to own a car in the last 7 years and I haven't even driven any car in the last 6. It's perfect that way. I hate driving. I wouldn't let the cops bully me into taking an Uber though. Afaik it's still legal to walk in the US?
• imd 2y ago
  Almost this exact situation happened to author Ray Bradbury in Los Angeles, where he lived without a car. He wrote several short stories memorializing the incident, including a scene in Fahrenheit 451.
• splwjs 2y ago
  What month was it? Because if it's summer in austin and you're standing around downtown then you probably are struggling in one way or another. Also downtown austin is disgusting; maybe they were just stunned someone would be there on purpose before the sun goes down. Hope you enjoyed the museum/trip though
• piliponful 2y ago
  US is strange
• seanhunter 2y ago
  This is definitely not my experience in Austin. I was only there for a week but I stayed downtown and walked just about everywhere and there were always lots of other people that I could see walking also. They have a lot of walking paths (eg near the river) so it never felt strange and I had no encounters with law enforcement. I would say the downtown area of Austin is more walkable than some other US cities in my experience. But I note that you're saying "Near" downtown Austin so I guess it depends where you were maybe?
  • kmarc 2y ago
    Indeed it wasn't in the very centre. However, I do remember a night, when we went out with colleagues, and from one place we were to switch to another, it was less than a mile away. We stepped outside, and one of the colleagues were looking for a taxi / checking Lyft already; we, the visitors, didn't understand; are we really gonna wait and then squeeze in a car, instead of walking 10 minutes?! We eventually walked, and it was perfectly safe (and lively) at that time of the night.
• nox101 2y ago
  > 98% car free European life. Your European life might be car free but, I was surprised when a friend who lives in Brussels, where I've been 4 times now and walked all over, told me he loved his time in Japan because it was the first time he could live car free. I was like WAT? You live in Brussels! It seems to have reasonably good public transportation. He was like, I live in the suburbs and have to drive to/from work every day. I certainly love living in a walkable city, but I also realize that can be somewhat rare, even in Europe. Friends live in Solingen (home to Henckels knives and Haribo Gummies). AFAICT it's not walkable. Düsseldorf is though.
  • darreninthenet 2y ago
    I work for a Belgian company and have been to Brussels a few times for work... not only is the central city all very walkable, they have amazingly good public transport (if a bit confusing at times... Citymapper is brilliant for this). But yes most people I work with seem to drive into work for their commute with only the occasional person getting the train. The office in central Brussels even has a load of free parking spaces they can book on their day in the office (company is hybrid one day/week in the office). And the idea of commuting more than 30 minutes is utterly horrifying to them, which as a Londoner I found an interesting perspective - a 30 minute commute to the financial district in London would still put me in an inner London suburb with incredibly high housing costs so my commute is way longer than that.
  • weast 2y ago
    Haribo is from Bonn, not Solingen! The name states as much, in its quintessentially german Consonant-and-vowel aliteration technique: (Ha)ns (Ri)egel (Bo)nn. Much like Rimowa (Ri)chard (Mo)rszeck (Wa)hrenzeichen, or Leica (Lei)tz (Ca)mera.
    • nox101 2y ago
      Thanks! I guess my Solingen friends didn't know either. They just took me to the Haribo factory in Solingen and told me that's where it's from (-_-);
• BobbyTables2 2y ago
  Have you read “the Pedestrian” by Ray Bradbury? (Short story)
  • kmarc 2y ago
    Hehe, thanks for pointing me to it. I just read it. Can identify with it! Now, back to my regressive tendencies...