What did Mr. Leonard Mead in "The Pedestrian" most love to do?

Leonard Mead is a writer, and like many writers he loves to go for solitary walks. They are a way of unwinding after a day's intellectual work at a desk, and they are also a means of building up creative energy for the next day. Presumably Mead is still writing, although he is finding it harder and harder to get published because fewer and fewer people are reading anymore. Instead, they sit in the dark...

Leonard Mead is a writer, and like many writers he loves to go for solitary walks. They are a way of unwinding after a day's intellectual work at a desk, and they are also a means of building up creative energy for the next day. Presumably Mead is still writing, although he is finding it harder and harder to get published because fewer and fewer people are reading anymore. Instead, they sit in the dark watching their television screens. Mead can see the shifting lights of their television sets through their windows. Ray Bradbury wrote "The Pedestrian" in 1953, when television was all black and white, but he foresaw the introduction of color television before 2053, when the story takes place.

To enter into that silence that was the city at eight o'clock of a misty evening in November, 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. Leonard Weed most dearly loved to do.

The fact that walking in the city at night was what Leonard Mead most dearly loved to do seems to foreshadow the probability that he will be deprived of this one pleasure by some impending event. A man walking alone at night in a residential neighborhood can be an object of suspicion—but this story is set one hundred years in the future, when a man walking alone at night in a residential neighborhood is something very strange and alarming. Why isn't he at least driving a car? Why is he out walking during "prime time" and missing some of the best shows on television? If he doesn't have criminal intentions, then the only other possible explanation is that there must be something wrong with his mind.

Notice the condition of the sidewalk. This is not a slum neighborhood but strictly middle-class. It might be Beverly Hills or one of the better residential neighborhoods on the Westside of Los Angeles, where Ray Bradbury lived for so many years. Yet the concrete walk is "buckling," and he has to step over grassy patches. This is because the city is not taking care of the sidewalks, and the city isn't taking care of the sidewalks because no one is using them.

In the end it appears that Leonard Mead will be deprived of the one simple pleasure he so dearly loves. Either the Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies will somehow condition him to cease his regressive behavior, or else he will be afraid to venture out at night in the future because of his traumatic encounter with the robot police car.