By now, we all know it’s cheaper — and more environmentally friendly — to walk or bike to places than to drive a car or SUV. But is the low-cost, low-impact way always feasible in the motor-happy, open-freeway-obsessed U.S. of A.? That’s what we’ll be exploring this week at EcoLocalizer in a feature we’re calling “Walk This Way.”
The question of whether to walk, bike or take public transportation is a no-brainer if you live in a city like New York, where driving can often be more of a pain than a pleasure. But what about the rest of the country? Not every community is large enough or dense enough to offer the auto alternatives the Big Apple does. And what about people who live in rural areas where everything is a half-hour’s drive away or more? Can we refashion our country’s way of getting around to be more European? Or are those of us in unwalkable communities doomed to either move elsewhere or live like so many billions do in the rest of the world, consigned to life in a radius of space measured in only a few miles?
James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency and A World Made by Hand, sees us entering what he calls “the twilight of Happy Motoring.” As fossil fuels become more expensive and harder to obtain, he says, the U.S. population will have to return to more human-scale communities. Goodbye Las Vegas. Goodbye Orlando. Goodbye Houston. We must, he says, imagine “a future without cars.”
It’s something I’ve tried to imagine in my own community, a small but spread-out part of northwest Florida with little in the way of bus or rail service. Could I ride a bike to everywhere I needed to go? Right now, the answer for me is yes and no. Yes, the grocery store, beach, hardware store and medical clinic are all reasonably close by bike. But only if everyone else starts biking and gives up on cars, too: there’s only one major road to everything where I live, and I’d be taking my life into my hands if I traveled on it by bike today. Next year, though, five years from now? Who knows? The main drag could be a lot less quieter and safer then.
I’m not the only one thinking that way these days. The fact that so many others are imagining a future with less dependence on cars explains the launch of sites like Walk Score, which lets you learn more about the 2,508 most walkable neighborhoods in the country’s largest 40 cities. It’s a neat concept, and fun to browse through for curiosity’s sake, but are many people really going to pull up stakes and move just for walkability’s sake? I’m guessing we’ll have an answer in the next few years.
So let’s take a long, hard look at walking this week: where can you walk, and do you? Have you been walking more lately and why? And are there ways to make the places we already live more walkable, or are certain communities bound for ghost town status in years to come? Walk this way with us this week, and let’s have a discussion about walking.