Not long before the pandemic hit, someone reported me to the police. I wasn’t selling drugs or stealing a car or making too much noise in the middle of the night. I wasn’t even breaking the law. My only crime was to stroll through an American neighborhood where walking is not the done thing. “People here drive everywhere,” the policeman told me. “Walking sets off alarm bells.” A joke, right? Wrong. In a world in thrall to cars, walking is often seen as deviant behavior. I grew up in a Canadian city where people would drive rather than walk 10 minutes. My earliest memory of walking to high school was hearing some guy hanging out the passenger side of his friend’s ride, hollering at me, “Get a car, loser!” In many cultures, landing your first set of wheels is a rite of passage, a passport to adulthood. Driving can certainly …