In "The Pedestrian," crime has been all but eliminated in Los Angeles in 2053. We learn that in a city of three million, there is only the need for one police car:

Ever since a year ago, 2052, the election year, the force had been cut down from three cars to one. Crime was ebbing; there was no need now for the police.

The implication is that crime has been eradicated because nobody goes outside anymore. When Leonard Mead walks at night, all he sees are people inside their homes, glued to watching their TV sets or rushing around the highways from one place to another in their cars. The sidewalks are falling into disrepair because nobody uses them. In fact, in the ten years he has been walking, Leonard Mead has never met another person on the streets.

Leonard misses nature and the seasons and the physical experience of weather. As he walks, he enjoys the sensations he experiences:

There was a good crystal frost in the air; it cut the nose and made the lungs blaze like a Christmas tree inside.

Walking is an old-fashioned pastime that makes him feel alive in a way that sitting at home in front of a television does not. Rather like Thoreau in Walden, he feels more alive the closer he gets to nature, and it awakens his imagination just as it does Thoreau's. For instance, Mead knows that if he shuts his eyes and tries hard, he can imagine himself

center of a plain, a wintry, windless Arizona desert with no house in a thousand miles.

Unfortunately for Mead, this once innocent behavior gets him into trouble when the city's lone police car spots him. Because it is so odd to see a pedestrian, the car pulls over to investigate. When Mead's answers to its questions seem very odd, the car insists that Mead get in and be whisked off for a psychiatric evaluation.