I think the key point here (which the author kind of dances around) is that walking puts you in a different kind of mental mode. He writes, "walking makes me smarter".
This jibes with my experiences when I started walking 5+ miles a day (that was before I had young kids that absorbed every minute of free time). I felt like it did make me smarter. Or at least, better at programming and writing.
I now commute by bicycle, and I think that is somewhere on the spectrum between driving and walking. But even on a bicycle, you have to be in "collision avoidance mode" pretty much continuously. Your mind still wanders -- but with a lot more interruptions and alerts.
I think there is something "magic" about walking -- by which I mean something great, but something that we may not be able to scientifically understand in my lifetime. We know we evolved to walk upright, and we can measure a lot of the physical health benefits it confers, but we still don't know enough about the brain to prove that it benefits cognition, happiness, satisfaction, etc.
I walk to work in Manhattan. Definitely always in collision avoidance mode or stressing about something else, like all the clouds of God knows what kind of dust coming from the drywall and other remnants of interior demolition being recklessly loaded into garbage trucks. And I'm choking on the fumes of all the cars that shouldn't be there.
Ideally, I'd walk a mile to work through a forest, nature trail, or a large park.
Yeah, there's definitely the fact that you have to be on alert on most roads. However, you do always have the option of getting off and walking if that's what suits you, pushing the bike with you. You can't really get off your car and tug it behind you on the sidewalk :) .
Pretty much everything described in this article applies to other activities or lack thereof. We sitting in front of our computers too long or wearing out the couch too much eating potato chips.
Exercise, or just a simple walk, is critical for our lives. It affects our outlook on life. We don't lack the ability to handle the busyness of modern life.
>Pretty much everything described in this article applies to other activities or lack thereof.
Except the most poetic part of the article that recounts the results of heavy car traffic and lack of foot transportation — a huge negative impact on our sociology, not just on our physical health.
I have become a proponent for walkable cities, public transportation reform, streets hidden from pedestrians, and narrow city roads. I'm extremely pessimistic about everyone else getting on board with these studies, though. People are quite proud of driving and their cars. We need to move forward and evolve transportation for the sake of our physical and mental health and for the sake of our society. I'm wondering how to get that national conversation started.
I don't think it's essentially a national conversation. I think it has to be a thousand local conversations that borrow from one another.
When people visit me in SF from more car-heavy areas, they're shocked to learn that I never have owned a car here. But by the time they've ridden our 4 mass transit networks, used a rental bike, taken a ferry, and gone with me somewhere in a CarShare car, it makes more sense. When they hear that I don't pay for car repairs or insurance or gas, they really start to get it.
We got this over decades of local conversation and iteration, consciously borrowing from other cities like New York and Amsterdam. Other cities can do it too if they want. And I think many are. I hear lots of of good things about cities being increasingly friendly to pedestrians and cyclists.
If only there were some sort of venue where people could socialize some sort of set of shared values to connect the daily struggles of the individual in the present moment to the community, and to the future... a way to build stories around what it means to be a good human being, and to teach the next generation how to live a better life. we could call it something like, say, "organized religion". funny thing, though, it seems to get a bad rap on these pages more often than not :b
If only this venue thing you speak of hadn't been cutting off heads and burning at stakes and filling the pockets of fraudsters and promoting outrageous superstitions and unjust persecutions for the past several thousand years it might be worth investigating. As it is... it does indeed have a bad rap. Deservedly.
Can we nip the climate change religion in the bud?
I hope you find these examples horrible regardless of your opinions on CO2-governed climate change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFO0ayOz9FY (Warning: This is a horrific video that shows climate change activists graphically executing children and others who disagree with the climate change orthodoxy. It was produced by the climate change activist group 1010uk to promote reduction of carbon dioxide emissions.)
Or maybe we should only strangle doubters and "their kind" in their sleep (Joe Romm). Or just have trials with unspecified consequences (James Hansen).
Persecution and execution are more strongly correlated with tribalism and ambition than religion. See French Revolution, Nazi-ism, high school, and internet comment forums.
Religion is an excuse for persecution, not usually a cause.
Oh, don't worry! These days we have plenty of other venues for filling the pockets of fraudsters and promoting unjust persecutions and the like. (Will have to get back to you about the beheadings, though - secular beheadings have been pretty minimal since the French revolution.)
The US is massively subsidizing this lifestyle and making it more attractive than elsewhere in the world. This is the only excuse for US style suburban sprawl vs similarly developed countries.
We are massively subsidizing it by:
-Not pricing in to user fees all costs of roads (especially over several life cycles of the road). This applies to highways but also local roads where infra in sprawly neighborhoods costs more than denser/centric neighborhoods but usually are paying same property tax rate
-Not pricing in to user fees cost of resource security (oil)
-Not pricing in to user fees all externalities of personal auto use on health care system - what is healthier our system or one where you have to walk a bit?
-Mandating from the highest level an interstate highway system, the funding of which no common person understands (gas tax goes in and then distributed around country to pay for 90% of road project - why not local funding so people understand where the money comes from?)
-We are not regulating green field development - we are letting developers build what they want because it makes the most money without asking how is the best way to build the city. Is the best way to build a city "leave it to the developers to build what makes them most money" ?
-Our zoning is designed to separate stuff which makes cars the only option.
Why does this matter? Because the government is choosing how we build our cities and they are choosing cars. It is not the free market.
Check out Jeff Speck "Walkable City" for lots of facts, examples, and ways forward.
The system that manages the money flow isn't perfect but we don't subsidize driving.
I think you're confusing subsidizing it with taxing it like cigarettes. We don't discourage driving because that would discourage utilization of land that isn't located near a population center. Land is a natural resource that we can't practically use up (short of massively contaminating it) and to discourage its use would be moronic.
I just gave a bunch of examples of how we're making driving cheaper than it would be if only supported by user fees... that's a subsidy.
I think we subsidize it because we thought it was a good idea back in the day - we chose cars and for example, Spain, chose trains. There are pros and cons to each. I suppose my point is that we CHOSE at every level of government.
This is the lens I see the world through and I think choosing cars (or how Spain chose trains) massively effects a society's quality of life. I want people driving to know that we as a society chose to support cars - to subsidize them to make them cheaper - and there are pros and cons (eg. more freedom but less walking). Anecdotally, no one I know thinks about it - they assume that's just the way it is and there are no alternatives. Maybe even that it's the result of free market.
>> Walking 30 minutes a day— [...] lowers the risk of heart disease by up to 40%, reduces the risk of Type II diabetes by as much as 60%, and can cut the risk of stroke by a third.
Can we please stop with this "Walking 30 minutes" ridiculousness. Yes it is correct, but only if you compare the 30-minute walkers with shutins or elderly people who rarely if ever get out of their chairs. Most of us already get far more than 30-minutes of far more vigorous exercise.
I did 45 minutes in the pool today (2.75km) spent an hour walking my dog, and dealt with numerous stairs ramps and other not-sitting things. I'm not anything I would call "in shape" but would another 30 minutes of walking really reduce my diabetes risk by 40%? I think not. So stop telling us that extra 30-minutes of barely moving will make a hoot of difference.
'Most of us already get far more than 30-minutes of far more vigorous exercise.'
[Citation needed]
I mean it's great that you're doing nearly 2 hours of exercise a day, but many people I know drive to work, sit down all day, drive home, sit down all evening. It seems to be pretty common at least across the UK:
Yikes, it's worse than I thought, even: The study found that nearly 80% of the population fails to hit key national government targets – performing moderate exercise for 30 minutes at least 12 times a month. It found that just over 8% of adults who could walk had not – with the exception of shopping – walked continuously for five minutes within the previous four weeks, while 46% had not walked for leisure for 30 minutes continuously over the same period. Almost nine out of 10 had not swum and a similar proportion had not used a gym.
>> I did 45 minutes in the pool today (2.75km) spent an hour walking my dog, and dealt with numerous stairs ramps and other not-sitting things. I'm not anything I would call "in shape" but would another 30 minutes of walking really reduce my diabetes risk by 40%? I think not.
All that exercise and you're still crabby - maybe a walk would do you some good after all?
I agree it's sort of grating and trite to hear these articles throwing out some random numbers chosen from a bell curve for their journalistic impact and then touted abstractly.
However, I've also just got back from living three years in London, and compared to living in 3 American cities and one Brazilian city, I can tell you the difference of living in a truly pedestrian friendly city with solid multi-modal transport options leads to a lot more walking, and I felt the health benefits of this. Even considering that I cycle commuted in all of the aforementioned cities, just the convenience of not needing a car (nor uber or taxis for that matter) led to a lot more walking above and beyond my natural recreational activity which I would find a way to do anywhere I lived. It's hard to quantify, but it's very very real. In the US there are very few places where you can live and not feel severely restricted without a car—you can do it in New York, and you can sort of get away with it in SF (although a lot of people's lifestyles would collapse if they had to give up their Uber and Lyft to instead rely on Muni)—but most places metros are tiny or non-existent, and buses are primarily used by the poor and have terrible service. There's no doubt in my mind that this has huge impacts on public health, but of course it's impossible to isolate the effect and quantify it since countries that do these things differently have all sorts of confounding cultural differences.
I found the same benefit living here in Trondheim. The city is built for pedestrians -I'm always safe walking. grocery stores and pharmacies are built in locations accessable to walkers, though to get to 'big' stores you'll have to walk a bit. I have normal commute of 30 minutes walking daily. Most times a vehicle wouldn't be any more convenient and I'd still just walk. High fuel prices and vehicle taxes help encourage walking. I never had anything near this in the States. A town of 3000 people was more inconveniently spread out over the landscape, and most streets lacked sidewalks. Laws favor automobile traffic at the expense of pedestrians and cyclists. All of this could be done in many areas in the states, unfortunately it requires a change in zoning regulations, change in laws, and some major investment in infrastructure.
I look forward to electric (and autonomous) cars for air quality alone. As a dedicated pedestrian fewer cars on the street will directly translate into an improved quality of life. It would be amazing if heavily urban areas would dedicate even larger spaces as car free.
Autonomous cars probably will not reduce traffic. If anything they might increase it. For instance they will allow any number of current non-drivers to take to the road. The very old/blind or anyone else physically unable to operate a car need no longer rely on public transit, not to mention countless children.
Even without adding new drivers, there is the horrific probability that autodrive cars could be used to avoid parking fees. Why pay for parking when the car can circle the mall for a few hours on its own?
The reduced cost of operation may also result in more vehicles. (I disagree, but most here assume will be cheaper than a standard car+driver.) If vehicles suddenly become far cheaper to operate, any number of businesses may send out autodrives where today doing so would be cost-prohibitive. The private security industry surely has ideas for autodrive cars to replace on-foot security patrols. And, as with uber, the addition of transport options priced somewhere between taxis and public transit surely will draw customers from the later.
Traffic around good places to park consists of lots of cars circling. Maybe a result would be less parking and less cars circling so more of those primo real estate places can be dedicated to other uses.
Autonomous cars won't do much more than cabs for reducing the number of cars on the street, will they? They'd mostly reduce the number of cars sitting unused in driveways at any given time, but you still have just as many people who need to get from A to B.
I think a lot of us are quietly hoping the Auto-car will lead to some sort of CarBNB outcome, where the car can be scheduled by almost anyone when it's available. The car's owner is just another passenger, except maybe they can bump another's schedule and call the car to them on demand.
I'm more interested in Car-as-a-Service. Basically, I pay a monthly fee for car access from a fleet in my metro area. When I need a car, I text a pickup and dropoff address to dispatch, which runs the numbers and sends me an eta. If I know I'll be making a trip ahead of time, I can bid for an appointment though a web or app interface which lets me see what prices will likely win for certain time slots and trips. That way dispatch can optimize fleet size, travel time, and eta by charging a monthly fee for system maintenance plus trip fees for each trip. All it has to do is be cheaper than what I pay now to maintain my own vehicle.
Autonomous micro buses and some intelligent route planning algorithm have the potential to make the current "single human transported by 1t of metal" model obsolete.
This jibes with my experiences when I started walking 5+ miles a day (that was before I had young kids that absorbed every minute of free time). I felt like it did make me smarter. Or at least, better at programming and writing.
I now commute by bicycle, and I think that is somewhere on the spectrum between driving and walking. But even on a bicycle, you have to be in "collision avoidance mode" pretty much continuously. Your mind still wanders -- but with a lot more interruptions and alerts.
I think there is something "magic" about walking -- by which I mean something great, but something that we may not be able to scientifically understand in my lifetime. We know we evolved to walk upright, and we can measure a lot of the physical health benefits it confers, but we still don't know enough about the brain to prove that it benefits cognition, happiness, satisfaction, etc.
I strongly suspect that it does, though.