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i just had my GCSE english retake exam  :( any way to get to the point there was some article on americans and walking. " the average american walks only 75 miles a year" Thats 1.4 miles a week or only 200 meters a day. and that this guy invited his neighbours over to dinner and they DROVE less than 100 feet.  ???


LMAO


Craig


This is not meant to insult anyone

Craig you should read Bill Bryson "A Walk In The Woods" it really puts it in perspective!
A lot of towns in the US don't even have paths/pavements for people they are purely car-orientated. Our neighbours in California used to drive round for dinner, and they lived next door to us

My geography teacher lives at the boarding house on the school grounds and he still drives to school.

It's a different mentality.  When I've visited the core of a large city (ex. New York), people walk.   It's a lot faster than taking a taxi (or horrors, giving up a prized parking spot).  In suburbia, "convenient" shops, etc are several miles away (the closest "convenience store"  is over a mile away from my house)  and more often than not, across one or two major streets/roads.  Walking then becomes a risky proposition.

Having said that, I've recently taken up force-walking as an exercise, (force-walking because I don't like to do it, but I must) a specific mile every night at the local gym.

& the irony is this - everywhere you go in the US (except certain banjo twanging townlets where Bubba & his sisters are very well acquainted )  you will see more people out walking for exercise than anywhere I've been in the world ......

[quote]& the irony is this - everywhere you go in the US (except certain banjo twanging townlets where Bubba & his sisters are very well acquainted )

Probably the same with bikes.

See it this way: If you walked as a means of transportation, you wouldn't have to walk for an excercise, thus having more time for FS and stuff.

Irony is seeing people load up the car so they can go somewhere for a walk.

Irony is: Driving a Hummer everywhere you go and then the only time you walk you get run over by a Mini

So we're agree that American small town planners should be introduced to their feet then (even if we have to use a rope to pull their bellies in). That seems to be a concensus

There's a town right outside of Fort Leonard Wood that I hated because it seems that it was built with the cab companies in mind. The town had several highways and a couple interstates through it, making it impossible to walk from place to place, and forcing us to spend a lot of money on cab fares if we wanted to go somewhere

I found a 12-mile walk to the town hall quite challenging and, while at a stop on my bicycle year before last, I got my shins scarred while avoiding intersection traffic cutting close to the corner. A report recently came out that a poll was taken of licensed drivers: a great many didn't know that pedestrians had the right-of-way; some didn't even know they had the right-of-way at a crosswalk ! Unfortunately for the pedestrians, one needn't score a 100% on the driving exam so testees can get that one wrong before hitting the road (and whatever is on *or near* it).
*sorry, this needed the modification.

Yeah, the article in the exam was from Bill Bryson's book. Quite scary though, I liked the 'do you take a light aircraft to the supermarket' joke  ;D.

i wont bother with my drive thru story again. you all know it