This “nightwalker statute,” as it was known, then became central to the colonial law instituted in North America in the late 17th century. The distant origins of the so-called “common night-walker” lie in late 13th-century England, when Edward I introduced the Statute of Winchester as a means of enforcing the curfew that prevailed at that time throughout the nation’s towns and cities. “To enter out into that silence that was the city at eight o’clock of a misty evening in November,” the story begins, “to put your feet upon that buckling concrete walk, to step over grassy seams and make your way, hands in pockets, through the silences, that was what Mr. So, in this far from distant future, no one travels by foot. Indeed, the police state has in effect proscribed pedestrianism. In Bradbury’s dystopian parable-it is a satirical portrait of Los Angeles that, because of its bleak attack on urban alienation, continues to resonate-the supremacy of the automobile has made it impossible in practice to be a pedestrian.
It is set in a totalitarian society at the midpoint of the 21st century, roughly a hundred years after it was written. “The Pedestrian” (1951) is a science-fiction short story by Ray Bradbury, only three or four pages long, about a man who, after nightfall, roams aimlessly and compulsively about the silent streets of a nameless metropolis.
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