Pedestrian mania

Today’s Independent has an interesting feature on the lost world of ‘pedestrian mania’

Edward Payson Weston lived to be 90, at a time when life expectancy for his peers was mid-40s. Aged 70, in 1909, he walked almost 4,000 miles from New York to San Francisco in 105 days, and at 71 he walked from Los Angeles to New York in 77 days.

He urged people to walk to keep fit, and warned that cars would make people lazy.

And then he got run down.