By reputation, walking is not sexy, either as a form of transportation or of exercise. Injunctions to walk are minimalist and bound to dreary routine: Walk down the hall rather than sending an email, to burn a few extra calories. Walk, don't drive, to the end of the driveway to get the mail. Wear a pedometer, take the stairs, you'll be amazed how it all adds up! Walking is not the prescription for six-pack abs or buns of steel. Few people (in the grand scheme of things) suggest it as a way to go any further than the corner store.
And walking as transportation has impediments that are both heavily structural and heavily cultural.
Atrios is always on the case of walkable neighborhoods and challenges thereto (as is his wont, there's no one big Atrios post to direct you to, more a steady drip, drip, drip of them laying out his general worldview far more patiently than I could do). The point he makes again and again is that being able to walk as a way to get from one useful point to another is a heavily structural issue. Is there enough density that you can get from here to there on foot in reasonable time or do you have to walk past acres of parking lot? Are there walk lights at intersections or do you risk your life darting across at a break in traffic? In many cases, it isn't even legal to build walkable urban environments (like New York City, or Boston) any longer given zoning laws.
The culture creates the zoning laws, of course, but once they're there, the lack of sidewalks and the long distances from Point A to B are a serious structural impediment to walking anywhere. But whatever the interplay of structure and culture, culture is a serious boundary as well to walking-as-transportation.
I spent two summers living in Alabama, one close enough to an old town center that there were some sidewalks, one on a country road. The summer I spent in the town with sidewalks, I occasionally walked to do an errand or go to the gym. I was forever having to turn down rides from helpful neighbors, from a clerk who recognized me from the one time I'd stopped into her workplace, from strangers. But nothing illustrated how far outside the norm attempting to walk someplace was in that culture like the first time I tried to walk anywhere the summer I lived on the country road. There was a gas station half a mile away and enough grass at the edge of the road that I didn't think I'd get run over, so I set out. Halfway there, I was stopped by the police, who ran my license. The ostensible reason I was stopped was that there had been a break-in reported about a mile away just minutes before. But there was no way I could have been at the break-in and where I was on foot; really, I was stopped because I was doing something suspicious simply by walking along the road.
Then there are the claims that walking is worse for the environment than driving. The story goes that exercising just makes you eat more, and our food production system is so carbon-intensive that you'd do better to drive than eat a little extra. While drawing attention to the carbon footprint of our eating habits is legitimate, Clark Williams-Derry at Grist debunks the notion that driving is better:
First, driving emits more global warming pollution than most people allow for. Burning a gallon of gasoline -- the only thing that some people count when considering the climate impacts of cars -- releases a little under 20 pounds of CO2 per gallon. But refining and transporting petroleum releases an additional 4 to 5 pounds per gallon. Plus, CO2 is emitted in car manufacturing and repair; in building and maintaining roads and parking spaces; and even running car insurance offices. You also have to add in climate-warming NOx emissions from vehicle exhaust. All of those extras add up. (To be fair, the same is true for agriculture. There's a lot of methane and NOx released from cows and rice fields and fertilizers, which might not get captured in an energy analysis.)
Second, walking consumes fewer calories than most exercise hounds think. The right measure isn't how many calories you burn by walking; it's how many you burn walking, minus how many you burn just loafing around. Without that correction, you're likely to overestimate the calorie demands of hoofing it -- and thus underestimate the "miles per gallon" you get from shoe leather.
And third, adding a short walk to your daily routine doesn't necessarily increase your consumption of food, or of food-system energy. Sadly, most of us already eat more than we need, so upping our exercise may just keep us a bit slimmer, rather than encouraging us to eat more. Even if we do eat a bit extra, some of it will likely represent a reduction in food waste (Americans waste something like 1,200 food calories per day!). Plus, things like refrigerators and dishwashers don't consume any more energy if we eat a bite or two of extra food each day. All in all, powering a short walk may not raise food system energy all that much, above and beyond what we use in a typical day.
When I ran the numbers a year ago, I only looked at the first two points above ... and I still found that walking gets more miles per gallon than any car on the market. (The third point is just, er, gravy.) Plus, obviously enough, your personal mileage will vary, depending on what you choose to eat. A vegan locavore pedestrian might be even more fuel efficient than an intercity bus. (There's a sentence you won't read every day.)
So we can walk for exercise (though it does take a lot of walking to produce weight loss) or we can walk to get places. As a combination, that's pretty good. I get most of my groceries on foot, and have done so even when the closest grocery store was more than two miles away. Four to five miles, two of them with a pack full of groceries, is the hour of moderate exercise recent health recommendations call for.
Those reasons are probably enough for me. Even walking 3 or more miles most days, I also go to the gym 3-4 times per week. And while I think that ultimately the energy use of big corporations is most important to rein in to minimize global warming, I also think that the United States needs a significant cultural shift away from wanton individual energy use -- we need to drive less, take public transit more, eat less meat, eat closer to home, turn our thermostats down in winter and up in summer.
But there's another reason. For me it's the tipping point between walking as virtue and walking as necessity; maybe for someone else it's the tipping point between not walking and walking. The New York Times recently posed the following question to a set of experts:
Are our sedentary life styles so pernicious that we need to rethink the current office culture — for example, switch to standing desks or exercise stations or change our work schedules? Or are there ways to stay in the chair 10 or 12 hours a day?
The first paragraph of each of the first two responses said the same thing, almost to a word. Architecture professor Galen Kranz said "As a species we are designed for movement" and Peter Katzmarzyk of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center said "Humans are designed for movement." Maybe not for zipping along, cheetah-like, but equally not for being chairbound.
Walking puts your body in tune with itself. Head up, core muscles engaged, arms swinging freely, muscles flexing all through your legs. You don't need to just poke along, you can really move. But you can keep going and going, too, under your own power.
I won't go so far as to say walking puts your mind in tune with itself, but it does open up a space for something like that. There's time to enjoy being outside and breathing fresh air, time to watch the things you pass by rather than watching them pass you by, time to think things through, but you're not just...sitting there. You're going somewhere, getting things done.
Sometimes walking is a slog. There's no question. For me, going uphill in the beating summer sun can be a misery. But it's worth it as the way home after going to the movies, or browsing around stores for an afternoon. Sometimes walking the same route day after day feels like it's getting old, and then one day I get to the bridge that's more usually a trigger for my fear of heights right at sunset and I'm astounded to find myself in the middle of a soaring landscape of grand buildings, green trees, and open air. Instead of looking down at my fears I'm looking out and around and it's awe-inspiring.
Sometimes walking makes me a misanthrope (even more than I usually am). I can't find an opening to get out on my own and I'm all surly muttering about the slowpokes walking three abreast just ahead of me, the women in heels that force them to mince along inches at a time, the amateurs who don't know how to traverse a little snow. Then sometimes I find the rhythm I need to move around them.
Sometimes, I'll admit, I feel stupid when I try to walk faster. Rushed and graceless and awkward and not necessarily that much faster. Sometimes, I find this extra gear that just isn't always available, and my stride lengthens smoothly like there's a whole extra set of muscles pushing me forward, efficient and powerful in a way that reminds me of a dream of flying.
As for sexy...try walking side by side in a cool evening breeze, laughing and talking and finding that high gear together so you're slipping past everyone else as if you're in a different world.
All I'm saying is, it's worth a try. Whether you can walk from home to work or to do errands, or have to drive to the first store but then can walk from there to the next several. We were built for it. Might as well see where it can take us even given the difficulties we've imposed upon it.