I live in a very driving-oriented city (I’ve tried to walk places where you really couldn’t get there from here on foot), but I’ve still walked much more than a lot of people. Back when I worked downtown, rather than pay an arm and a leg for parking or do the public transportation shuffle, I’d drive to just north of downtown and walk in (about half an hour). I used to love doing that - clears your head, gets your blood moving, gets you ready for the day, and I had some really lovely parks to walk through. I never had a day all winter long where it was too cold for me to walk - at -30ºC, you just need more layers. I hate the rain, though. I hate wet feet.
Now I live close enough to my work that it’s just far enough that it’s too far to walk (it would be about an hour walk), but so close I feel silly driving. Oh well. Maybe I’ll park a little farther away and walk in again.
Oh, I walk to Safeway all the time - I’ve got one of those old lady carts for my groceries. You young whippersnappers might be too young and cool for them, but I sure ain’t. The only problem is that I haven’t shrunk enough yet - I’m still a little tall to grasp the handle comfortably.
I have one of those “granny carts” (as I heard them called once) although at the moment I don’t use it much when I’m shopping because it’s a bitch getting it on and off a bus. What I use instead right now is a luggage cart and a large canvas bag which straps quite nicely onto it. I’ll probably use the cart more after I move, since I won’t necessarily be taking the bus.
there’s a grocery store about 20 minutes walk away from my apartment. My gym is 10 minutes the other way. There’s also a couple of restaurants and ethnic food stores nearby. So I’m lucky that I can walk to all those places. Still, it wasn’t until gas got expensive that folks I work with seemed to think it might be a good idea to do so. Granted, this is southern Florida so it’s hot and humid. But still, a walk at night for a few groceries is hardly a marathon. I should get myself one of those tricycles with a basket so that I can carry a decent load of groceries home.
My main reason is yes, I’m lazy. Secondarily, though, if I walk at lunchtime like other people here at work do, I’ll come back sweaty and exhausted, and the rest of the day will be a crappy unproductive mess. I’m also on a food plan that doesn’t give me a lot of extra energy so I sit tight and try to at least eat better.
I do need to consider walking after I get home from work. We don’t have sidewalks near me but there are a number of relatively quiet roads I could walk.
One of the things that makes walking a bit harder is having small children. They have a lot of energy for playgrounds, but not so much for walking to the grocery store. As folks with young children tend to live in less densly-populated areas, it gets even harder to walk conveniently. Add in the pressure to get home quickly to pick the kids up from daycare or school, and you can really develop a well-ingrained habit of piling into the car every time you go somewhere.
I’m all for walking, but it just doesn’t happen as much as I’d like around here.
I love walking. I walk my dog for an hour or two every day, for starters. I bike most places but if it’s less than a 15 minute walk I’ll walk, every time. I’ve even walked home (1 hr) in the rain rather than take public transit (1/2 hr).
If I drove, I’d be annoyed by the traffic and the parking. Walking/cycling for me require the least amount of mental effort: you just keep moving forward. Transit and driving require a much greater degree of stopping and waiting and dealing with idiots and solving difficult problems (like finding a parking spot, and remembering where it is when it’s time to go home).
When I look at how many rants around here (mini- and otherwise) are about driving, I wonder why people consider that the easy option. For me, walking is the easy option.
Urg. I have to let the steam out of my skull for a minute…
Ah, much better.
Two years ago my wife was diagnosed with colon cancer. She went in for surgery, had it removed (all is now well), and was in the hospital for three days.
Her son was about 8 blocks away at school when this went on and he didn’t come to see his mother while she was in the hospital. I pressed him on it - “You should come see your mother. She’s in the hospital and it would do her spirits good to see you.”
His answer: “It is too far to walk.”
To say I was dumbfounded would be an understatement.
I would kill to be close enough to work to walk. As it is, I’m 20 miles away. I estimate it would take me about 6 hours to get here at a fairly brisk walk/trot.
However, I walk to the grocery store if I just need to pick up a few things and take my two-year old son, who walks most of the way, but I inevitably have to carry a few blocks. We also walk to the park and to the lake nearby to see the ducks. I can’t wait until he’s older so I can walk him to school in the morning.
I’ve met a lot of people who do live close enough to work to walk and most of them a) haven’t thought about it enough to realize that they’d probably get there faster with a little planning and walking or b) don’t want to get sweaty before they get to work or c) couldn’t fathom not taking the car because they have to haul a bunch of crap with them (laptop, papers, lunch, purse, planner, etc.).
I live close enough to my work to walk, but I rarely do for multiple reasons:
Time - I would have to get up that much earlier to get to work on time, and I already get up early enough. Also, I like to go home for lunch, and if I walked it would take up most of my lunch hour.
There aren’t any sidewalks. This isn’t a problem where the traffic is light, but a couple of the roads are heavily traveled, and there’s not much room to walk safely.
If it’s hot I end up getting to work all hot and sweaty. I don’t like that.
If it’s wet I end up with muddy shoes where I have to walk on the side of the road with no sidewalks.
Laziness.
I do like to walk, but I’ll more likely take a walk after work on a hiking trail than walk to and from work.
I’m exactly two miles from work, but it’s two miles of not-so-great neighborhoods. It would be safe if more people walked, but they don’t. I have a scooter instead, althoguh I haven’t been able to ride it lately since Himself fucked the wheel up.
For all the crap you haul to and from work - back pack. Once you’re hauling it on your back, you start to get selective about how much crap you really need to take there and back.
For the sweaty problem - wear clothes that you can sweat in, and once you get into work, go into the bathroom and use some paper towels to mop up what you can. It’s not perfect, but it worked for me for years. If you have to dress in suits or something, it makes things harder to walk to work, so maybe you need to change at work or just walk when you get home.
I don’t walk often. Dallas is certainly not a walking town. In my neighborhood, I could walk places but I don’t.
The complex I live takes about ten minutes of walking to just get out to the street. It sprawls and twists and turns.
Walking to the grocery store? Nope. If I’m buying beer, sodas, and flavored water there is no way I can carry all that plus a week’s worth of groceries for two people. I’m not making multiple trips to the grocery store.
So, where else can I walk to? There are bars and a couple of restaurants. However, I’d have to add on 30 minutes each way to walk there. No thanks.
I do spend an hour in the gym every day, however. I’m not overweight and out of shape.
If I lived in DC, NY, or San Francisco, I’d walk a lot more. Sunbelt sprawl cities aren’t designed for walking. All the wishing in the world won’t change that.
See, this is why I really look forward to a time when electric cars, hybrids, and fuel cell cars take over. Think of how much more pleasant life in the city will be without all the fumes and noise.
I love walking around, but hate all the car traffic.
I hate walking (and running) because my feet are tender and I have cartilage damage in one knee. I prefer to swim, or bike, or lift weights or dance or play Wii Fit for exercise, I find those less boring (I listen to music on public transit and at work already, and never stop thinking about things). Plus, depending on the occasion, I’m often called upon to wear boots or heels, which makes it that much harder on my feet, and my bag is heavy enough without chucking extra shoes in it. My walk from public transit to work (different city) is about 15 minutes, which is fine, but I wouldn’t want to go any longer than that. I don’t care how much other people walk, and I don’t avoid it whenever possible. Walking with other people is fun, because of the other people. I just don’t enjoy it as an end.
I love walking. My current goal is to walk an hour a day, and I can usually combine that with errands–going to the library, picking up a few groceries and carrying them home. I’m very lucky that my neighborhood is so pedestrian-friendly. I wish I could walk to work, but I have a 15 mile commute, so that’s not an option.
Fifteen miles each way is bikeable, if (a) it’s fairly flat and (b) the roads aren’t too horrendous.
I have about a 40-mile journey to work, but I do it in three legs, bike - train - bike. The bike parts total about 9 miles and take about 40 mins, the overall journey takes an hour and a half.
Having said that, the past couple of days it has been hammering it down with rain, thunder, lightning the works.
Still, I’ve found that I actually quite enjoy cycling in torrential rain. Once you’ve got as wet as you can possibly get (which took about three minutes last night), you get to a kind of Zen level and start to find it quite refreshing
Yeah, I live in the mountains and it’s 15 miles on the highway. If I were to go back roads, it would be closer to 25. So unfortunately, biking isn’t feasible. It would be cool if it were, though.
Wow. I notice no one from NYC has chimed in, or I missed it if they did. One of the great things about this city is it’s walking friendliness. I noticed when in my in-laws small town in Texas which is walking distance from anywhere to anywhere, the temptation to drive is still there. We drove distances I thought were kind of silly, though I can understand if it’s broiling out.
I’ve walked more than a mile today, possibly even two miles, and I feel like I’ve been getting soft lately. I need to shed about 30 pounds because I can really feel the strain that puts on walking. When I weighed 30-50 pounds lighter than I do now I walked anywhere and everywhere and was never afraid of a long walk.
It always shocks me the kind of people that won’t walk anywhere. It makes me understand our dependence on foreign oil better, as well as the obesity problem. This thread reminds me of something funny from the book, “Black Swan”, which is about uncertainty and such. He talks about odd group behavior, like people taking the escalator at the gym, to get on the stairmaster. Now, along with that one, the guy on the four-wheeler getting his mail will stick with me forever.
