Walking the Distance

I am not tremendously fond of walking. I find it a little slow and tedious. However, I am very much in favor of walkable places, which include lots of destinations, good facilities like sidewalks, and friendly drivers-- the kind who understand that an intersection doesn't have to be painted with stripes to be a crosswalk. In fact, I make my living, in part, by trying to convince skeptics that you don't have to give up access to the things you like to do and the people you like to see when you use active travel like walking and bicycling instead of driving.

And who can oppose walking when it looks as cute as this?

As it turns out, I was searching about for my name in Blogger, and I came upon a site on urban planning maintained by Randy Crane, with whom I worked for some time on this subject at Irvine. It is called planningresearch.blogspot.com, random thoughts on, of all things, urban studies. And if you go there, you will find the type of things I often think about, and used to actually know quite a bit about. From there I linked to someplace else, and from there, a third place, until I received the idea of finding what businesses are in my walking shed by using an online directory of sorts, Qwest.

So I did this little exercise to see how much access I have from my house. What's access? It's basically a measure of how easy it is to get the goods and services you want. Of course, I am not counting all the things I can have delivered to my house without making a single trip out the door. I wanted to count how many destinations I can easily walk to. I found out that from my front door, in a 15 minute walk, I can access all of the following business types in various quantities described.

Business & Professional Services Consultants (3)
Engineers (2)
Health Care Dentists (114)
Physicians & Surgeons (M.D. & D.O.) (94)
Legal Attorneys (171)
Manufacturing, Production & Wholesale Manufacturers' Representatives (3)
Restaurants, Food & Beverages Restaurants (166)

Now that's quite a lot of businesses at my foot-tips. In fact, I can walk right past 3 coffee shops to get to my favorite, and still have walked only ten minutes, less time than it would take to drive my car and walk from any but the most ideally located parking space. But if I am not looking for any of those services, (it's all well and good that 171 lawyering businesses are nearby, but they are of no use if what I really want is a plumber), what should I do? Well, call one and get him over here, like Joshua did this morning to avert our most current plumbing crisis. Now if I want a doctor, but none of the ones I want are within a mile, I can still get access by hopping on my bike. It's no secret here in town that I choose my health care providers based on their proximity to my house. This is what allowed me to walk home from the hospital after Riley was born.