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This is not a column for agoraphobes.

This is about decades-long efforts to line the hostile streets of our sprawling, car-addicted, Southwestern city with smiling, sociable pedestrians, by making Albuquerque more "walkable." Count me, an exercise freak, as an advocate.

With lots of money and attention, our city has bought some successes, most notably in Downtown, Old Town and Nob Hill. Weirdly, however, some neighborhoods here that defy criteria for walkability teem with foot traffic and have done so for years - without much bother or booty from City Hall. I'm not sure anyone, anywhere, has figured exactly what to make of it.

I'm talking about some of the less-well-off neighborhoods that straddle Central Avenue for a distance east and west of Pennsylvania Street. I've been visiting them often lately on warm, dark nights.

Most people understand by now what walkability is supposed to look like. You can get the picture from the "Walkability Checklist" put out by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Department of Transportation, Partnership for a Walkable America and others.

Walkability involves wide, clean sidewalks without obstructions, pleasant things such as trees and brick pavements to look at, aromatic cafes, nice boutiques and other destinations convenient to your multi-story residence, well-marked crosswalks that give you ample time to reach the other side, good security, friendly neighbors and so on.

Such amenities can be scarce around East Central. Yet the area is a marvel of street-side activity.

Most obvious are the characters on Central itself, who lurk, sometimes madly, under the neon lights of the Pussycat adult video, lie comatose astride a sidewalk or glance furtively from intimate conversations, as if engaged in drug dealing or prostitution. The area - nice and wholesome in many ways, please understand - does endure some of the worst crime stats in town.

Go inland from Central, and the sidewalks that pierce low-income neighborhoods there are even busier. People from apartments and rental houses walk the poorly lit streets at all hours, like a promenade of ghosts from Hades - many of them surprisingly young.

Or they sit on balconies or in open front doors chatting and watching the parade. The gloomy sidewalks boast no landscaping to speak of, are flecked with trash and broken glass, and have enough cracks or other threats that many prefer to walk in the streets instead.

Why so many footfalls? New Urbanist-style remakes can't explain. I think it's because the neighborhoods are crowded with people, many of them unsupervised young folks, who can't much afford cars or gas, have no air conditioning in the summer heat, have little to do and nowhere to go except maybe the local convenience store - so they create life for themselves by walking around and socializing.

It's a back door to walkability, caused by old patterns of development. It's not what most urban visionaries have in mind. If circumstances were improved, even more people might walk. But yuppifying the area could squeeze out the poor. What's a New Urbanist to do?