By Jay Walljasper

Once in a while you come across a juicy tidbit of information that gloriously confirms something you always suspected was true. That happened to me last week when reading William Murray's book A Walk in Rome--a collection of musings, memories and historical research from the New Yorker's longtime Italy correspondent.

Authorities who want to corral and order pedestrians for the convenience of motorists really do exhibit fascistic tendencies.

Murray (whose obituary I discovered in the New York Times only an hour-and-a-half after finishing the book) notes that Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was so deeply troubled by the chaos of people walking around central Rome that he enacted strict rules governing pedestrians. Everyone on the busy thoroughfare Via del Corso was commanded to walk in one direction on the east side of the street, and the opposite direction on the west side. This crude attempt at social engineering was, of course, a spectacular failure, and it provides an uplifting example of the creative human spirit triumphing over those who want to control us like so many sheep.

A wide smile crossed my face as I read this little story, since it substantiates my longstanding claim that authorities who want to corral and order pedestrians for the convenience of motorists really do exhibit fascistic tendencies. I have occasionally used that F-word to describe politicians and traffic engineers who impose impediments to the free flow of foot traffic. Now I have the historical record to back me up.

It's pedestrians that bring life to a community, and it's cars who suck all the life out.

But I am slightly embarrassed at how most modern-day North Americans willingly submit to this sort of auto-cratic injustice. Romans living under the bootheel of Mussolini's fascist regime refused to accept this infringement of their right to walk the way they want to walk (as another grandson of Italy, Bruce Springsteen, put it). So why has no one in Winnipeg, a city famous for its radical history, torn out the sidewalk blockades at Portage and Main, one of the most celebrated intersections in Canadian history? Why don't folks in Seattle, a hotbed of enlightened civic activism as seen by the recent Placemaking conference, revolt against the police department's longstanding policy of issuing jaywalking tickets to innocent souls simply crossing the street? And why for crying out loud haven't more New Yorkers, America's closest counterpart to the colorfully anarchic Romans, resisted former Mayor Rudy Giuliani's campaign to confine pedestrian movement in order to promote more cars in an already traffic-choked city?

It's high time that we stand up to planners and politicians who don't yet understand that it's pedestrians that bring life to a community, and it's cars who suck all the life out. While it's important to lobby public officials for traffic calming and other public safety improvements, it's also important to assert the fact that our streets don't exist merely for the ease of motorists. Traffic calming, after all, was invented by frustrated citizens in the law-abiding Netherlands, who illegally moved old sofas and planters into the street to slow rushing traffic when the local police weren't enforcing speed limits. Improving the life of your community sometimes means takin' it to the streets.