Take a Walk

By Ellie Hodder

Ellie Hodder is the
founder of Women Walk
the Marathon® in
Portland, OR and
creator of the website
www.everything4walkers.com

Walk More and Save On Gas

As the cost of gasoline keeps going up, I keep thinking how lucky it is that I am a walker. What do people do to conserve fuel or dollars when they have no inclination to locomote on their own power? I imagine times are hard for them, and getting harder.

In late January, something curious happened. Gas prices at the pump dropped by a few pennies, not because oil prices dropped on the world market, but because Americans dropped their consumption by 1% in 2007.

Interesting, I thought, imagining that we’d really curtailed the miles at the wheel. Convinced that we’d sucked in our collective gasoline potbelly and made a big dent in our driving, I sharpened my pencil:

“Let’s see, Americans drive roughly 12,000 miles each year. 12,000 times .01, divided by 52 is…that can’t be right.”

So I did it again, and again. To decrease gasoline consumption by 1% all we have to do is to drive 2.31 miles less per week! Now that’s interesting.

This isn’t a civics lesson about the world oil economy. I don’t truthfully know if we can impact fuel prices by driving less.

But with gasoline prices soaring, a more realistic question to ask myself is this: Is it possible to walk to do the things I used to do when driving?

I wanted to know what that would require so I did another word problem. Assuming my vehicle gets 20 miles per gallon, I’d have to drive 16.5 miles less per week just to stay even if gas prices increase by $.25 per gallon.

As prices began to rise last year, I decided to see if I could drive significantly less. Since most of my “out of the office” work and meetings are in the evening, I decided those would stay on the “drive there” list.

In looking at my weekly activity, I determined to try walking to the grocery store more often and walking to neighborhood restaurants on most occasions when we eat out.

Better Grocery Lists
The grocery store where I do most of my shopping is 4.9 miles from my house. I was going there about once a week. Could I drop that to once a month?

I began by making actual grocery lists (to replace the ones I used to keep in my head.) I thought about what I could purchase that would last four to six weeks, like paper and canned goods, and items I could freeze, like bread.

Next I bought a collection of packable grocery sacks that clip onto my fanny pack. These are about the size of a lemon and open to hold about 20 lbs of groceries. That made it convenient to walk to a local grocery store, produce stand, or farmer’s market to buy the things I needed between drives to the grocery store.

Net savings? By the end of the summer, I was down to one auto trip to the grocery store every five or six weeks — a savings of 8.2 miles per week.

Dining Out
We eat out about once a week. This is less than the national average because we both like to cook, but we asked ourselves if we could decrease our driving here, too.

Our favorite haunt is 7.1 miles away. We scouted the neighborhood and found that there are three or four restaurants we like that are less than a two-mile walk from our house. If we chose one of these three times a month, and drove to the distant eatery once, we’d drive 10.7 miles less each week.

Taken together, those two small changes shaved 18.9 miles per week off our previous driving total. Instead of feeling cheated, we felt fit, more in control of our finances, and we enjoyed the benefit of an additional relationship-building walk several times a month.

I know everyone’s experience is different, and your personal solutions will vary widely. Not everyone lives close to convenient shopping and dining. Other ideas include combining the Park ‘n Ride with public transit, walking to complete errands during the lunch hour, and combining multiple errands into one single driving trip.

As walkers we are in a unique position to be able to turn the thing we do for exercise into a tool to empower other areas of our lives. As Martha Stewart says, “It’s a good thing.” And I agree: It is good to be a walker.