The Lord reveals that streets that were once teeming with activity are now empty. Their being laid waste is suggestive of the terrible calamity that had overtaken them. No one walks in them
can also be translated as with no one passing through
(NIV). This may refer either to strangers travelling through the land or simply to the ordinary movement of citizens.1 Either way, the citizens are either dead or deported.
6 “I have cut off nations; their battlements are in ruins; I have laid waste their streets so that no one walks in them; their cities have been made desolate, without a man, without an inhabitant.