American life

A couple of years back I read a book about American life. A study on the walking habits of American people showed that the average American walks about 300 m a day. Only 300 meters a day! I rack up that mileage just looking for the TV remote. It is 10 % of the distance my mother, 84, covers a day. Eating greasy hamburgers and walking less than a baby could crawl a day is obviously the cause of obesity and sweet urine.
American cities and towns in general are not so designed for pedestrians. It is for automobiles. When I visited San Jose first time, I remember how I was surprised at broad streets with no pedestrians. It looked to me like a ghost town. Nobody was walking. Go to any suburb developed recently and you will not find a sidewalk anywhere. It is not unusual that you won't find a single pedestrian crossing.
I had brought this home to me when I went to San Diego 3 years ago. When we were driving to LA during a night for a meeting next day, we found one of those endless zones of shopping malls, motels, gas stations and fast food places that sprout everywhere these days. We stopped for coffee. I noticed there was what appeared to be a training gym across the street. I wanted to go there to see it because it was a weird sight for me that tens of people were silently running on treadmills facing the street at such time near-midnight. So I decided to skip coffee and pop over.
Although the gym was no more than 50 meters away, I discovered that there was no way to get there on foot. There was a traffic outlet for cars, but no provision for walkers, and no way to cross on foot without dodging over six lanes of swiftly moving traffic. In the end I had to get in our car and drive across. There was simply no other way.
It is an irony that people came to the place by car to do exercises in order to consume their fat that could have been consumed if they had used their legs to come.
I heard that auto makers used to buy railway companies only to close them to boost the sales of their products. Maybe they destroyed sidewalks for the same reason. And if it isn't sad, I don't know what is.