ABSTRACT
Mobile situation: across the parking lot by foot, Aalborg East, Denmark [21 August 2013] On her daily bus journey, a woman often gets off at the bus stop right next to the large parking lot of a grocery store. The bus stop is her point of interchange from one mode of mobility to another. It can be a relief for this traveller to be met with a breath of fresh air and the bodily shift from sitting and waiting in the bus to walking, particularly if it has also been a rough ride with abrupt braking, too many people or too much heat. At this point, she shifts from being a passenger to being a pedestrian who is in control of her own kinaesthetic efforts to move forward. She finds it a good place to get off because it is quite welcoming to her embodied walking, with clear path connections that make it safe for her to continue her journey. However, both the bus stop area and the parking lot can appear ‘gloomy’ at night. She finds that the lights are too sparse in the parking lot, and that makes her feel anxious. When she gets off the bus, she switches off her phone to be attentive to new sensorial impressions. Her primary concern is traffic safety; she wants to be alert to the sounds around her when walking on the paths or across the parking lot. In springtime, when she cannot hear well due to hay fever, she tends to turn around every other second to make sure that there is no moped coming up behind her or a car making a dangerous turn in the parking lot. After getting off the bus, she follows the sloped pathway a little way down, until she walks across the narrow verge and onto the parking lot. Even though it is a more direct route to use the staircase to access the parking lot, she rarely does so because she would end up ‘right in the face of the cars’. That feels like an unsafe situation for this traveller, who finds that she never really knows if car drivers are paying attention or not. In the parking lot, they might be occupied with a child on the back seat or a mobile phone they just dropped on the floor. In addition, this woman does not walk that well, and the staircase is an obstacle for her. In winter, the entire area of the parking lot is difficult for her to engage with. It tends to be icy and is not sufficiently salted: ‘It’s like trying to walk on soap’, she says. The parking lot is an open, extended surface where cars can come from many directions and move suddenly. As a slow walker, this traveller experiences this as a rather insecure situation that she has to navigate with great care and
attention. The design of the open, surface parking lot allows cars to spread out and drive anywhere. When the lot is less than half full, as is most often the case, there are very few material items that work to organize the routes of cars, and no places where vulnerable travellers, like this woman, are shielded.
