From my door to the hardware store and my mechanic are both exactly one mile. Since they’re dog-friendly, sometimes I’ll combine my dog walk with a necessary errand. The dog’s vet is about a half-mile away, so also no big deal. There’s not much else I consider within walking distance.
Late 70s, not driving anymore. 3/4 mile to supermsrket, carry home up to 12 pounds comfortably. Once a month I need milk, 8 pounds, so I jump a bus, 1/3 mile, and do my Walmart shopping. Rarely need to go outside the 3/4 mile radius which includes doctor, bank, drug, library. It;s OK, even when over 100 in south Texas. All on trafficless residential streets. All this changed when I moved 3 years ago.
What’s easily walkable depends on where I’m starting from. When I was working in an office building (remember those?) friends and I would walk a couple of miles every afternoon. Obviously anything along those walking routes - and we had 4 to choose from - was easily walkable.
But I don’t go on walks at home. Why? Because my road is less than 1/4th a mile long, and then dumps out onto a major intrastate route. There are no sidewalks or breakdown lanes and cars go 50+. That’s neither safe nor easy walking.
The distance I can comfortably walk on any given day is inversely proportional to my age on that day. Since my age is monotonically increasing, it follows that the distance I can comfortably walk is monotonically decreasing. Lately, it seems to be in the vicinity of about 1/4 mile. The usual limiting factor is my back, which starts hurting about then. Also depending on how much ibuprofen I’ve chowed down and how recently.
I walk at least an hour almost every day, but at 64 years of age, I expect that to begin to decrease. I really miss my weekly 5 mile mountain hikes.
There’s an Exxon on the main road. It’s 2 blocks from where cars turn into our neighborhood. I can walk to the Exxon from my house in about 15 to 20 minutes. I have walked over there for small groceries or just a Coke and candy.
It’s a nice diversion on a sunny Spring day.
There used to be an old Strip mall at the entrance into our neighborhood. There was a beauty shop and Tastee Freeze from the mid 1960’s in it. We used to walk down there with our family for ice cream or even a sandwich. Sadly, a car dealership bought that property and closed all the little businesses. A slice of Americana we’ll never get back. I’m pretty sure the strip mall was originally built to support our suburban neighborhood at a time when mom’s were at home. Dad drove the family car to work.
I live in a suburban (claimed to be semi-rural but it’s really not) town but my house in a quiet neighborhood is 0.7 miles from a CVS, 7-1, McDonalds and a few small shops (chocolatier, seafood shop, florist, etc).
1.2 miles is a big shopping center with grocery store, restaurants, TJ Max, Homegoods and some other shops.
I walk to the grocery store or seafood shop to buy a few items. Or to McDonalds for a coffee. Our neighborhood is very walkable, there are people walking all the time with kids, dogs or just for exercise. There are people who walk two hours a day!
But when I am walking with a small bag of groceries, people will ask me if there is something wrong with my car or license and if I need a ride! And I have a bit of a reputation as the “strange brown guy who walks to the store” apparently.
Chicago here. I’d say about six blocks before I take the bus.
It’s blocks, not miles.
I live in Manhattan so I’m used to waking everywhere, and especially now with the pandemic I have tried to take the subway as little as possible. 20 blocks each way seems like nothing, and when the weather was nicer I’d walk more than that just to get out and do something.
I picked a very walkable area. 1/2 mile is easy. More than that I tend to bike or drive. I’d rather not carry grocery bags or tow a shopping cage-cart more than about 1/2 mi.
Everything in the town center is less than 1.5 km from me. That means I walk to the hairdresser, post, grocery store, bank and bakery. Anything further is either public transportation (which I’m currently avoiding) or the car.
In Switzerland, most places require you to pay for parking. So I avoid driving, and tend to walk. Also when I go to the big city (Luzern or Zurich), I also take public transportation and then walk. At some point I acquire enough bags that I decide that walking is no longer convenient.
Most big cities in America do too as well. I drive into every city, but once I am at a big city center, I pay for parking but then walk and take public transportation once I am there. (I only take public transportation if it is a subway-style system, unless it is a bus system that is free and easy to understand. If there is a subway-style system I never take the bus since even in systems that are relatively sparse like DC and Boston, walking to the subway is faster than trying to figure out the bus system. It might be different if I lived there and needed to haul back groceries for a mile.)
Anything within an hour’s walk is easily walkable to me. We bought our house here six years ago specifically because it is within walking distance of everything.
In my 20s I was a waitress in Boston, in a heavily touristy area, and I often had customers ask if X, Y, or Z was “walking distance” from there. I never knew how to answer that unless it was across the street. I didn’t know actual distances, but I knew that, for me, the entire city was walkable. I didn’t have a car, the subway shut down early, and cabs were pricey for a kid like me, but I had walked home to my Back Bay apartment from parties in Cambridge and Allston. But I also knew I had worked up to that, and most suburbanites would feel differently.
Now in my 30s and living in LA with a car, I’ll still walk 2 miles to a restaurant, though not to the grocery store.
It really depends on what I need to do at the business and how much time I have to do it.
I live in a very walkable area (high 90s walk score), but it’s also really hilly. So for me, the grocery store that’s a mile away is too far to walk and carry groceries home from. But I had no problem walking another half mile past it to get my dog groomed (I didn’t have to carry the dog there or back). Pre-COVID, on a nice, sunny day where I’d nothing else to do, I’d walk to my gym, workout, and walk back. But, if I had a tight schedule - or the weather was crap, I’d take my car. There are a few places that I’ll walk down to, but not back up from.
When tourists ask if something’s walkable, I tend to say “yes” if it’s under 10 minutes and downhill or under 5 minutes and uphill. Longer than that and I’ll try to give them enough info to make their own decisions.
I love to walk, but I don’t love to shlep stuff. I walk my dog a minimum of two miles a day, and more, depending on the weather. It’s been really windy and rainy, even though it’s been above 35°F. For errands, though, I don’t like carrying things more than a mile, so if I can’t fit whatever it is into a backpack, I drive. I’ll walk to the Kroger that is about 1.25 miles if I just need a couple of things, and bring them back in a backpack, but if I need a lot of stuff, I drive, or recently, even order from Amazon Fresh. The prices from Amazon Fresh are really pretty much the same as going into the store myself; it’s just that things I could buy in generic I can’t get in generic from Fresh. But the saved time is huge, not to mention the non-exposure.
I believe in walking rather than driving whenever possible.
I walk a six-mile round trip to Whole Foods. It’s worth it.
I can walk farther if I’m not carrying anything heavy, and if my
feet don’t have blisters. I’m in my late 60’s.
Despite having had a drivers licence since the late 90s I have never owned a car. I cycle a lot. I cycle in Winter. I have a cut off point of -10C below which I am not allowed to cycle after a somewhat bad experience cycling to work in -13C for 40mins or so and not feeling human for a good two to three hours afterwards.
So much like someone else said, it is complicated for me. There’s an overlap between “a bit of a walk” and “I can just do that on my bike”.
Until I retired this summer, I walked a half-mile to, and another fro, work almost every weekday. Thirty years ago, I had a remote sweetie in Brooklyn, and got a ride ‘to NYC’ to go see her. I got dropped off in the Upper East Side, and not understanding subways yet, walked 12 miles the length of Manhattan and across the bridge to Park Slope. Ten years later, my new wife and I walked 15 miles across odd parts of Chicago, only to have the friend we were visiting astonished to find we had survived… I still have dreams of just starting to walk and never stopping.
Several times I have dropped a vehicle off at the nearest auto repair place and walked 3+ miles home.
And then back again to pick it up.