Why No One Walks

I live in Brookside which is one of the more walkable areas of Kansas City. It's a pretty short hike up to 63rd Street where I can get just about everything I need for day to day living. Walkability is a big issue with me. It is my opinion that walkable neighborhoods increase property values and reduce crime. As I stated in an "As I See It" piece a while back, "why else would people pay $300,000 for a house with no air conditioning, bad plumbing and faulty wiring?" It's the neighborhood. And what makes a neighborhood is people. People outside in their yards, on the sidewalks. Activity on the street. How do you become an advocate for walkability? Keep walking! Take a little extra time out of your life to walk down to the newsstand for that Sunday paper instead of hopping in the car. Be an example for your neighbors. They will see you walking and they will be more likely to do the same. Eventually enough people will naturally become walkability advocates that instead of being the lone "wacko" at the community meeting you will be part of the majority. Then and only then can real change happen. Finally, some light reading given to me by a friend at kcskyscrapers.com. It's an essay by Bill Bryson called "Why No One Walks". Here's an excerpt. An acquaintance of ours was complaining the other day about the difficulty of finding a place to park outside the local gymnasium. She goes there several times a week to walk on a treadmill. The gymnasium is, at most, a six-minute walk from her front door. I asked her why she didn't walk to the gym and do six minutes less on the treadmill. She looked at me as if I were tragically simple-minded and said, "But I have a program for the treadmill. It records my distance and speed and calorie-burn rate, and I can adjust for degree of difficulty." It had not occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard.