Has everyone else been enjoying the week of guest posts? I have, and I noticed that having the variety of authors brought out some new, or at least infrequent, commenters.
One of them was Ilya. (How’s that for dumb luck, maiden comment selected for “Comment of the Week?”) I liked Ilya’s comment into Sarah Risser’s guest post, because they point out something we’ve probably all noticed, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen stated so simply in the BikePortland comments sections.
Don’t we all know that person who drives the kids to school, and then drives to a nearby park to walk a few miles? Here’s how Ilya describes it:
I see people from my block driving to the little shopping strip in Hillsdale, which is about 0.2mi away, to get a cup of coffee or a loaf of bread. It literally takes longer to drive there. This does not comport with the view that it’s a “useful tool.”
I don’t know that I would call it an addiction. It’s more like cars have become the default mode of locomotion. Walking, on the other hand, has become something that people plan for. They carefully plan out the route that they think would be safe. Sometimes, they even drive to places where they can walk. It’s fundamentally a different way of life. What can be done to change this paradigm?
Thank you Ilya. I’ve always experienced this as an east-coast, west-coast thing, which probably isn’t completely fair. But in the dense, east coast cities where I’ve lived, it’s easy to walk a couple miles a day just going about your business. In the west, for many people, taking a walk often seems to involve driving to a beautiful park. It’s recreational.
You can read Ilya’s comment and what everybody else thought, under the original thread.