What is walking distance?
How far do you walk? 1/2 mile, 1/4 mile, 6 minutes, 30 minutes? What is the distance you walk before you start to think that maybe driving or taking a bus makes more sense?
It turns out that walking distance has more to do with what you are looking at, and less to do with how far you need to go.
Walk Appeal promises to be a major new tool for understanding and building walkable places, and it explains several things that were heretofore either contradictory or mysterious. It begins with the assertion that the quarter-mile radius (or 5-minute walk,) which has been held up for a century as the distance Americans will walk before driving, is actually a myth.
The series goes on to discuss the measurable items that add (or detract) from walk appeal. It isn’t just a matter of building spaces that create a sense of mental well being. Walk appeal has commercial implications. Think of THE JOBS… won’t anybody consider the JOBS that can be won by places that consider walk appeal over places that dimiss it?
Weather plays a factor for me as well.
Walking down Georgia ave is DC was always an Olympic event….
There was the “pan- handler “dodge
The “sleeper on the steam grate” vault
And the ” hang on to the purse” snach
And before i get slammed for being insensitive i spent quite sone time working among that particular population and have a great deal of sympathy for them
But the reality remained.
I can walk for miles in Sussex and never get anywhere-but you can also talk for years in Sussex and never get anywhere either!
Half an hour if I am going somewhere to do something (like make a purchase that I will have to carry back or eat a meal). . .
Up to two hours if I am walking for fun or fitness. But here’s what sort of verifies your information: sometimes if I want to take a long walk I will actually have to drive somewhere to do it, because it would take me at least 40 minutes of walking to get to somewhere nice enough to want to do it.