Transit and walking are time consuming. Most people are just too busy. That’s obvious, right?
Well, as my family begins the ninth week of its experimentin car-less living, I’m finding a few flaws in that logic. Here are two.
1. Time spent on transit is different from time spent driving. People vary, of course, but for me, transit time is a pure gain over driving. I don’t enjoy driving. I’d rather read than listen to music or talk radio. And I can read without queasiness on all forms of transit. For me, then, car time is a waste of life, but transit time is living, and I’ll happily choose a 30 minute transit trip over a 15 minute car trip. For me, driving is time consuming.
2. Just so, walking doesn’t consume time, for different reasons. In fact, walking creates time. For one thing, if you walk for transportation, you don’t have to go to the gym as often.
More profoundly, walking gives you time you wouldn’t otherwise have at all. Walking makes you live longer, as Clark posted here. The largest ever study of the subject found that walking 30 minutes a day, five days a week, adds 1.3-1.5 years to your life, on average. (More vigorous exercise adds even more.) On reasonable assumptions (detailed below the fold), this relationship means that for every minute you spend walking, you get three back.
Time spent walking, then, is utterly free. It’s time you would have spent dead.
Nowadays, when I’m walking, I get a little pleasure in the thought that I’m cheating death, that every minute I spend afoot is an extra moment of life.
Boring, wonky, calculation notes:
My assumptions—which I’d appreciate some astute blog reader checking against the original journal article that reports the study on which Clark posted—are that you have to walk 30 minutes a day, five days a week, for thirty years to get the 1.3-1.5 year lifespan bonus. I made up the 30 year figure (too busy to read the journal (wink)).
Then I calculate 30 minutes x 5 (days) x 52 (weeks) = 7,800 minutes of exercise per year x (guess of) 30 years = 234,000 minutes of walking, repaid with 1.4 years or 736,000 minutes of added life. That’s about three minutes extra for every minute you walk.
Note that even if have to walk five days a week from birth to age 90, you’re still getting every single walking minute back, though you wouldn’t get three.
Jon Stahl
Not driving makes you happier. Being happier means you’re less stressed. Being less stressed means you live longer. QED. 😉
Clark Williams-Derry
Here’s a handy GoogleMaps mashup to see how far you’ve walked on any given trip:http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/
CptnBly
To begin, I want to thank the Durnings for being an inspiration to us all. If nothing else, you have created a dialogue that has people talking about conservation and, with any luck, examining their environmental footprint.I really enjoyed this post and agree with you, Alan. This past weekend my buddy and I had a quasi carless adventure of our own. From Bellevue, we took the 550 Express bus to 4th and Cherry. We then took a ferry to Bainbridge Island for a concert. For me, it is very liberating to go without a car. We met interesting people, enjoyed walking from point to point, admired the beauty of the Puget Sound from the front of the ferry – all experiences that added up to a wonderful adventure. To me, a car would have had an adverse affect on the trip and our mood.Keep up the good work!
Payton
This stuff turns up in the strangest places. I was walking by the Harris Bank branch around the corner from my office and saw this sign: Take a minute:For each minute you walk,add three minutes to your life.