What is wrong with walking?
Jul. 31st, 2008 12:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sparrInspired by this thread.
Americans, particularly of the non-"country" variety, seem to have a horrible ingrained bias against walking. Ignore the truly lazy and obese folks, who this rant is not particularly aimed at; I am talking about people capable of walking a couple of miles without hurting themselves who are simply turned off by the concept of walking more than the physical act.
The trip from your parking spot to the front door of a theater, mall, or anything else with a large lot can easily be a quarter mile. The mostly-indoor path from the front door of the Hyatt to the back door of the Hilton at Dragon*Con is over half a mile. A circuit of the typical mall on a shopping trip, especially if you include aisle-by-aisle coverage of a few department stores, can easily involve multiple miles of walking. These are things you do not think twice about doing, you are at point A, then ten minutes or two hours later you are at point B, no big deal...
But then someone actually suggests out loud that you do something that involves walking a half, or heaven forbid whole, mile. Are they crazy? Absolutely out of the question, what respectable person actually walks anywhere these days? Suddenly this thing that you do voluntarily on a daily basis becomes anathema, not even worth considering.
This is part of a larger problem involving people who unreasonably avoid public transit, refuse to take Greyhound or Amtrak, etc. What has gone wrong with our culture to cause this? How can we fix it?
Americans, particularly of the non-"country" variety, seem to have a horrible ingrained bias against walking. Ignore the truly lazy and obese folks, who this rant is not particularly aimed at; I am talking about people capable of walking a couple of miles without hurting themselves who are simply turned off by the concept of walking more than the physical act.
The trip from your parking spot to the front door of a theater, mall, or anything else with a large lot can easily be a quarter mile. The mostly-indoor path from the front door of the Hyatt to the back door of the Hilton at Dragon*Con is over half a mile. A circuit of the typical mall on a shopping trip, especially if you include aisle-by-aisle coverage of a few department stores, can easily involve multiple miles of walking. These are things you do not think twice about doing, you are at point A, then ten minutes or two hours later you are at point B, no big deal...
But then someone actually suggests out loud that you do something that involves walking a half, or heaven forbid whole, mile. Are they crazy? Absolutely out of the question, what respectable person actually walks anywhere these days? Suddenly this thing that you do voluntarily on a daily basis becomes anathema, not even worth considering.
This is part of a larger problem involving people who unreasonably avoid public transit, refuse to take Greyhound or Amtrak, etc. What has gone wrong with our culture to cause this? How can we fix it?
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Date: 2008-08-01 01:01 am (UTC)By the way I do take Greyhound and Amtrak quite a bit rarely fly, unless it's uber cheap (which a lot of the times it's cheaper than Amtrak), used to love long distance driving and exploring (until gas prices shot that down this year), and I'm an avid fan of Mass transit, but I'm spoiled by NYC's Mass transit system.