Getting in Touch with Your Inner Walker

You remember walking. It was your second major achievement in life, right after crawling. Then came running, skateboarding, bike riding, driving and dating – not necessarily in that order.

Lots of people have left walking behind and do as little of it as possible. As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, “The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.”

But there’s a movement across America to make walking part of a healthy and active lifestyle. America Walks wants you! And so will Honolulu rail once it’s up and running.

Walking will be one of many ways to access the stations, along with driving and parking, driving and being dropped off, taking the bus and riding a bicycle.

The Streets Blog Network (linked also at right) is loaded with information from around the country on citizen-driven efforts to integrate walking and transit into their communities' daily routine. In city after city, people write about how using transit improves their lives, reduces their living expenses and makes them healthier.

Going Car-Free

Some even give up their cars entirely and rely on bus and rail transportation to get around and get closer to their neighborhoods, as San Francisco resident Leo Babaula wrote about in his “lessons from a car-free life” blog.

Anti-railers would have you believe life is virtually impossible without driving a car for each and every need, but Mr. Babaula ticks off all the reasons why he and his family believe their lives are even better than before now that they’ve gone car-free. Here’s a taste:

“We sold our van (yay!) and didn’t buy a vehicle here in San Francisco. A few times we’ve rented or borrowed a car, and boy, it really reminds me how lucky we are to be without one. It’s such a hassle to drive, to find parking, to get a parking ticket (which I’ve done), to retrieve your car when it’s towed (yes, that happened, and yes it was dumb of me), to try to find places when you’re driving, pay tolls and pay for parking, to get stuck in rush hour… and so on.

“We ride buses and trains and walk. We’re getting bikes soon, but we decided to do one step at a time. We walk a lot! We purposely picked a home that was a block away from the train stop and has bus lines that are within feet of our front door. We can get anywhere in this city easily.”

The Babaula family made conscious choices where to live – close to train and bus stops. It works for them in San Francisco, and the same kinds of choices will be made by families here on Oahu, which already has one of the best bus systems in the country.

Not everyone can go car-free, but the option of relying on public transit is indeed available to most. Once Honolulu rail is operating and providing traffic-free transportation, a sizable number of Oahu residents will have made choices that allow them to walk or take TheBus to the nearest station.

Going car-free in your daily commute would give you many if not all of the advantages Leo Babaula mentions in his post.