“In exchange for profit and speed, we are losing the ability to make someone feel special… . While technology has vastly improved our lives in some ways, it has taken the humanity out of being a human.”
— Melanie Mackenzie, The Coast
“All the fancy economic development strategies, such as developing a biomedical cluster, an aerospace cluster, or whatever the current economic development ‘flavour of the month’ might be, do not hold a candle to the power of a great walkable urban place.”
— Christopher Leinberger, The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream
Christine Murray pulls up beside the curb on a leafy dead-end street. She steps out of her Ford Transit Connect, a compact white van with an aardvark nose and a stylish red swoosh that runs the length of the vehicle. Murray swings open the rear doors and slides a couple dozen bundles of letters, flyers and magazines into a dual satchel, then heaves the bag onto her back and cinches the padded harness around her shoulders and waist. Wearing knobby grey hiking shoes, she sets off briskly along Parkview Road, navigating the front paths and porch steps of tidy bungalows and boxy duplexes without looking down. Her feet know the route.
Murray, 48, has been a Canada Post “delivery agent” in Ottawa for 12 years. The official corporate designation sounds better than “mailwoman,” at least, and “letter carrier” no longer does the job justice. Murray is five-foot-three and weighs 100 pounds. The maximum allowable weight of her bag is 35 pounds, and she must be able to carry parcels of up to 50 pounds. The load is manageable, although she has monthly appointments with a massage therapist and a chiropractor. She also visits an Active Release Techniques practitioner, who exerts hand pressure to break up the fibrous bands that form in the soft tissues of the muscles in her legs, which log around ten miles each shift.
But the biggest pain, Murray tells me as she shortcuts through gaps between hedges, is that every task she has to perform is assigned a “time value.” From the start of her workday at the Station C distribution centre, where she sequences her allotment of correspondence and solicitations in large grey plastic bins, to carting those bins to the van and driving to her route, to actually delivering the mail, and then driving to the next stopping point to hit another couple of blocks, every move she makes has been quantified. Each lift and step is supposed to take a prescribed number of seconds. There is no accounting for a short chat with an elderly shut-in or a quick game of fetch with a friendly dog. A pair of border collies used to wait for Murray to throw their chew toys. “I think it was something we both needed,” she says, “but I don’t have time for that anymore.”
When I walk my daughters home from school, the postman who serves our neighbourhood always stops to talk. The girls race ahead to greet Gilles. “I’ve got a package from Grandma,” he’ll say with a wink. Or, “Your cat magazine is here.” Once, he attended to and called an ambulance for a neighbour who had fallen and cut himself badly, and he regularly helps people move couches or lift canoes onto the roofs of cars. As innocent as these encounters are, Gilles is going rogue.
The mailman’s steady presence on our street is reassuring — a “benign symbol of the larger web of governance,” proclaims the New York Times, and “of the national community as a whole.” As pen-named postie Bill Walker wrote in an essay for the Walrus, “[L]ike the firefighter and the crossing guard, the letter carrier is one of the uniformed characters that help ground kids in a world they don’t wholly understand.” A world that is changing fast.
In 2008, Canada Post unveiled its ambitious Postal Transformation strategy, a $2-billion undertaking that included recalibrated time values and the purchase of hundreds of those zippy white vans. The crown corporation was under pressure to streamline and modernize its operations. The change was overdue, yet things didn’t exactly work out. The new time values, says Murray, were calculated by managers who had never delivered mail. Strains and other injuries spiked among letter carriers, their union protested. And the strategy’s main goal — financial stability — remains elusive.
“Our role is evolving,” Murray said during the day we spent together, “to the point where we’ll probably disappear. Door-to-door delivery is going to vanish. Give it a few years.”
Less than a month later, Canada Post swung the axe. It announced that urban home delivery will be phased out over a five-year period, eliminating up to 8,000 jobs. Most of those workers will leave by attrition (thousands are expected to retire), and only about one-third of Canada’s 15.3 million households receive mail at the door; the rest already retrieve letters and junk mail from community boxes. Outwardly, then, the decision is prudent. Facing a 25-percent decrease in mail volume between 2008 and 2013, and a projected drop of 25 percent in the next five years, Canada Post would be looking at an annual deficit of $1 billion by 2020, according to the Conference Board of Canada. Something had to be done.
But wait. The corporation made a profit in 17 of the 18 years leading up to its 2013 announcement, including a record surplus of $443 million in 2010. The parcel business is booming, fed by e-commerce. Meanwhile, the United States Postal Service, a massive federal entity in that bastion of capitalism, earned $67.3 billion U.S. in 2012 and maintains a workforce of more than 500,000, including almost 8,000 letter carriers who deliver mail entirely on foot, the legendary USPS Fleet of Feet. And in the U.K., Royal Mail posted a pre-tax profit of £363 million in fiscal 2013–2014, albeit as a newly privatized company, a change ushered in by chief executive Moya Greene, who had previously served as the CEO of Canada Post. (Defending the service cuts in this country, current chief executive Deepak Chopra told the House of Commons that regular walks to the community mailbox will be good for seniors — not a bad idea for those who are able.)
I wanted to spend a shift with a postie because they walk all day. Are people who do this for a living, I wondered, happier or healthier than the rest of us? If so, what insights can they share? And: are they hiring? The labour climate at Canada Post waylaid those questions, as well as my desire to don the uniform. It could have been a good fit, but even before the end of home delivery made headlines, Murray advised me to look elsewhere.
What I saw were bigger tremors. A global pyramid scheme that’s starting to sway. Despite our appetite for online shopping, an institution that dates back to Confederation felt it had to eliminate its core service to survive. Information moves at a breakneck pace, and Canada Post’s delivery agents could not keep up, casualties of an economy driven by cheap fuel, quick returns and an insatiable thirst for growth. Businesses must adapt or they will die. But is speed the only answer? Can slowing down also pay off?
Amazon.com is the world’s largest online retailer. It had revenues of $74 billion U.S. in 2013 and is selling perishable groceries in select American cities in addition to its regular stock of books, electronics, inflatable furniture, diapers, Halloween costumes for dogs, zombie brain Jell-O moulds, sex toys and every other conceivable product, plus many you can’t even imagine. (Sigmund Freud action figure, anybody?) The company wants to use drones to make deliveries. There are rumours that robots will soon take over its distribution centres. But for now, because of the sheer variety of merchandise carried by Amazon, and the organizational jumble on its shelves, whenever you proceed through the checkout from the comfort of home, a human “picker” in a warehouse the size of several football fields gets his or her marching orders. We are outsourcing our walking with single-click shopping.
Pickers cover roughly 7 to 15 miles a day on foot. Handheld sat nav units tell them which aisle and shelf to go to, and count down the seconds they have been allotted to get there. The devices also help supervisors keep track of the pickers’ productivity. “You’re sort of like a robot, but in human form,” an Amazon manager explained to the Financial Times. “It’s human automation, if you like.”
When the website Gawker put out a call for insider stories, an anonymous picker at an Amazon warehouse in Nevada called it the hardest job he had ever loved. “I lost weight, got into better shape than I have been in years and met some people out of my comfort zone,” he wrote. “Ever wonder where people with mohawks, full-body tattoos and piercings work?” But that attitude was atypical. Most pickers complained about the byzantine hiring process, inadequate training, short breaks, forced overtime and false promises about bonuses and flexible schedules. “My initial thought was this is prison,” wrote a worker from Tennessee. “I felt like asking anyone sitting by me or standing in line next to me, ‘So, what are you in for?’”
In the blue-collar British town of Rugeley, north of Birmingham, an Amazon depot as large as nine soccer pitches sits on top of the abandoned tunnels and shafts of a coal mine that was once the heart of the local economy. Coal mining can be hellish, but it came with decent pay and a pension, as did most traditional assembly-line jobs. The average picker makes minimum wage. Many are employed by temp agencies and have to pound the concrete floor for months before being hired by Amazon proper. Their roles are transitory; in a sense, they are worth less than the machines that might one day replace them. Rugeley’s pickers are thankful to have jobs, but they don’t earn enough to stabilize the town’s economy. Even the development officials who welcomed Amazon’s arrival are questioning whether the warehouse will help the community in the long run. Not a very rosy vision of the new economy.
Christine Murray’s depersonalized workday lasts around eight hours. It ends when she delivers her final letter and returns the van to the depot. Routes got longer when the transformation plan kicked in, and even if she skips her breaks, she is rarely finished early. (“Although ‘cakewalks’ are being eliminated, we have seen no equivalent drop in the number of particularly long or voluminous routes, also known as ‘pigs’ or ‘widow-makers,’” wrote Bill Walker. “Route measurement, we are told, is necessarily an imperfect science.”) Murray earns around $25 an hour, a grandfathered wage. On a good shift — for instance, the cool autumn day that I shadow her — she enjoys the job. Sometimes she even loves it. Despite beefs with management, all those sore muscles and a cloudy future, she is outside, getting exercise. A chance to see every nook and cranny on her turf.
We cut through a grassy utility corridor and pause for a wistful look at some frolicking dogs. Murray empties her satchel along a row of townhouses, loops back to the vehicle and drives to a subsidized apartment building for seniors. In the dingy mailroom, she pushes Canadian Tire and Swiss Chalet flyers into 252 mailboxes. Even rapid-fire, this takes 10 minutes. She’s not sure what the time value is, only that most of this paper will go directly into the recycling bin in the lobby.
A man peeks through the tiny square door of a mailbox. “What are you doing in there?” he barks with theatrical impatience. “Hurry up. I might have a cheque for $50,000.”
“Nope,” Murray deadpans back. “Just flyers.”
A few old-timers sit on a bench in the lobby, eager to shuffle over for a look. Pension cheques and disability payments are due.
Murray steps into the elevator to take a parcel to the 17th floor. We’re joined by a white-haired man in a leather jacket. “Nice day,” he rasps, holding two fingers against the bandage over the surgical hole in his throat.
“Here,” Murray says to him, pulling a handful of blue elastic bands from her pocket, “I’ve got something for you.”
“What do you use them for?” I ask.
“Well,” he says, smiling, “I need something to wrap up all my money.”
That exchange, though fleeting, came to mind when I heard about the end of home delivery. Murray was fulfilling her role as a uniformed community figure in the elevator, distributing more than the mail. We think we can automatize our way to prosperity and happiness, yet by eliminating her vocation, the human touch is left behind.
Murray is not nostalgic. Some of her colleagues at the sorting station talk about the good old days, “but that’s the past,” she says. “It happened back there, and it’s gone. That’s where it belongs. The most important thing is right now.”
Other posties lament the values we are losing. “There is more to my job than sliding flyers through a slot,” Melanie Mackenzie, a letter carrier in Halifax, Nova Scotia, wrote in that city’s alternative newsweekly, the Coast, after Canada Post went public with its plan to end home delivery. “My job is to deliver you a better world.”
This idea is expressed on a grand scale by the U.S. Postal Service, whose main building in Manhattan is adorned with an inscription of those famous words by Herodotus: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” And on a grander scale in Hollywood. In the Kevin Costner film The Postman — which won Golden Raspberry Awards for worst picture, worst actor and worst director in 1998 — a drifter finds the mail van of a dead letter carrier in post-apocalyptic America (supposedly 2013). Costner’s character puts on the skeleton’s uniform, picks up his satchel and begins the dangerous and heroic process of re-establishing communication between isolated settlements, one letter at a time. “There used to be a postman on every street in America,” he says in one particularly rousing speech. “Getting a letter meant you were part of something bigger than yourself. I don’t think we really understood what they meant to us until they were gone.”
To parse what a lack of walking does to our economy, and the stability a greater emphasis on walking could provide, let’s begin with the basics: our health. In the United States, walking levels fell 66 percent between 1960 and 2009, says a 2012 benchmarking report from the Washington, D.C.–based Alliance for Biking & Walking, produced with funding from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This corresponded with a 156 percent jump in obesity rates. In 2009, 40 percent of all trips taken by Americans were shorter than two miles, yet 87 percent of trips between one and two miles were made by car, as were 62 percent of trips shorter than a mile. We might be able to manage some of these on foot.
Tasked by the Society of Actuaries with calculating the cost of obese and overweight citizens in the U.S. and Canada, actuarial researchers Donald Behan and Sam Cox came up with an estimated annual total of $300 billion — $127 billion for medical care, $49 billion from loss of productivity caused by excess mortality, $43 billion from loss of productivity caused by disability among active workers, $72 billion from loss of productivity caused by totally disabled workers. Patients with diabetes, they noted, account for one-third of all Medicare spending in the U.S.
Walking will not magically restore people to peak condition, but as Behan says with actuarial clarity, extra weight and obesity have “detrimental economic effects.” He calls for employers and the insurance industry to help people “make smart, healthy decisions.” To that end, when it released these findings, the Society of Actuaries also trumpeted a survey of American adults that found that 83 percent “would be willing to follow a healthy lifestyle, such as participating in a health and wellness program, if incentivized through their health plan.” If just one in 10 began a regular walking program, the country would save $5.6 billion each year, enough to pay the tuition of more than a million college students.
The economy doesn’t do anything without a healthy workforce, U.S. Surgeon General Boris Lushniak said at a forum in Washington in 2014. “Let’s go retro, folks. We used to walk as a society. Does it take a $150 pair of running shoes, or a $60- to $90-a-month membership in a health club? It doesn’t. It’s walking! Think of it as a patriotic duty for the good of our nation.”
Conceding that there is a paucity of definitive evidence, the Alliance for Biking & Walking report corrals together recent studies from throughout the U.S. to show that even without government support, communities that invest in walking and cycling projects save money not only through healthier citizens, but also through reduced traffic congestion and shorter commute times. They have higher property values, create new jobs and attract tourists. “As economic recession has hit almost every level of our society over the last few years, active transportation has emerged as a promising sector for growth and revitalization,” the report says.
The majority of North Americans live in cities, where concrete is the backbone of transportation infrastructure. When the urban jungle expands or requires maintenance, engineers draw up plans, and the heavy-duty machines — and people to operate them — rumble in. To repair something as simple as a footpath, concrete sidewalks have to be dug up and replaced. The drainage system will likely require attention. Trees might be planted, ornamental brickwork laid, pedestrian ramps built, signage installed. Bike-lane projects have their own rhythm. Markings are painted on streets, curbs extended, bollards fabricated. Roadwork falls into two main categories: resurfacing streets, which entails excavation, paving and painting, and more elaborate projects, which also necessitate engineering, drainage and erosion control, and perhaps utility relocations. These descriptions give you a general picture of transportation infrastructure work in Baltimore, Maryland. Pretty standard stuff. But when an economist looked into how these types of projects impacted employment, her results were noteworthy.
Anybody behind the wheel of a bulldozer or rattling at the handle of a jackhammer on one of these jobs is directly employed as a result of the work. Supply-chain industries, such as cement manufacturing and trucking, are the beneficiaries of indirect employment. Then there are the induced jobs, in nearby restaurants and stores, for instance, as construction workers spend their pay. Everything from the cafés where hardhats line up for their Americanos to the dairies that supply the cream can be counted. The City of Baltimore gave data on a range of its transportation projects to Heidi Garrett-Peltier of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts. She determined that every $1 million spent on creating on-street bike lanes led to 14.4 jobs, compared to 11.3 jobs for every $1 million spent on pedestrian projects and seven jobs for every $1 million spent on road infrastructure. The difference, she explained, is because bike and pedestrian work tends to be more labour- and design-intensive than road repair. That is, the ratios of labour costs to material costs, and engineering costs to construction costs, are higher.
Apportioning more spending into bike and pedestrian projects will to some degree undercut the auto sector and its spinoffs, but as we’ll see later in this chapter, most of the money spent on cars and gasoline leaves the local market. And just as a shift from fossil fuels toward renewable energy will lead to a bumpy labour market, a localized green economy — and the jobs it creates — is our best long-term shot at sustainability. (Chris Turner’s book The Leap offers an excellent account of this transition, which is well underway in Germany, where 31 percent of the country’s electricity was generated from renewable energy sources in the first half of 2014.)
Garrett-Peltier validated her Baltimore statistics with a national study on the employment impacts of bicycling, pedestrian and road infrastructure. Examining 58 construction projects in 11 American cities, a cross-section that included Anchorage, Houston and Madison, Wisconsin, she found that cycling projects create an average of 11.4 jobs for every $1 million of spending, versus 10 jobs for pedestrian projects and 7.8 jobs for roadwork. “The U.S. is currently experiencing high unemployment, unsustainable use of carbon-based energy, and a national obesity epidemic,” she writes. “All three of these problems can be partly addressed through increased walking and cycling.” Providing infrastructure for active transit, argues Garrett-Peltier, is more than a health proposition.
The bottom-line returns of walkability in Baltimore go way beyond employment. In 2010, its city council adopted a “Complete Streets” policy, a commitment to address the needs of transit users, cyclists and walkers of every age and ability alongside drivers in all future transportation development. More than 600 American jurisdictions have signed Complete Streets charters. Part of the motivation is the health and safety of residents, as well as environmental stewardship. But a walkable community also raises property values, points out a 2011 report from the Downtown Baltimore Family Alliance.
Walk Score, a Seattle-based company that ranks neighbourhood walkability based on inputs such as proximity to parks, schools, transit routes and grocery stores, has become a useful tool for realtors. Its scale ranges from zero to 100; communities below 24 are deemed car-dependent, while those above 90 earn the title Walker’s Paradise. In 2009, economist Joe Cortright analyzed 94,000 real-estate transactions in 15 American housing markets and found that a one-point Walk Score increase will boost housing values by $700 to $3,000, depending on the market. Going from an average to above-average Walk Score will increase a home’s value by $4,000 to $34,000. Las Vegas was the only city with a negative correlation between housing prices and walkability. Cortright, who did the research for a network of business, education and government executives called CEOs for Cities, offers some advice: “The nation’s urban leaders should pay close attention to walkability as a key measure of urban vitality and as impetus for public policy that will increase overall property values — a key source of individual wealth and of revenues for cash-strapped governments in a tough economy.”
Cortright compiled his data in the wake of the 2008 stock market collapse. The United States was deep in recession, and housing values were plummeting. It may seem counterintuitive to view higher real-estate prices as an indicator of urban livability, but not if you consider that the cost of a house reflects the quality of its neighbourhood as much as the condition of the physical structure itself. Also, that low and declining values are a sign of a troubled community, in extreme cases leading to social and economic collapse, such as Detroit’s depopulation and bankruptcy. The acute fiscal anxiety of 2008 and 2009 may have passed for now, but the recession gave millions of Americans an opportunity to contemplate the role that walkability could play in a new approach to their cities: chiefly, the value of better transit, more mixing between commercial and residential land uses, and connected, complete streets. The next financial shock may give us another push in this direction.
“The upheaval in financing markets, the dramatic decline in housing prices, retrenchment in the retail sector and the ongoing restructuring of the automobile industry are all harbingers of change for the nation’s cities,” writes Cortright. “Continued uncertainty about future energy prices and the need to deal aggressively with climate change will demand new strategies in the years ahead. Our research suggests that walkability is already an important component of the value proposition of the nation’s cities, and that improving walkability can be an important key to their future as well.”
In addition to the real-estate gains, the Downtown Baltimore Family Alliance found that pedestrian zones in the city centre increased foot traffic from 20 to 40 percent and, as a result, retail sales grew between 10 and 25 percent. Customers on foot spend more than people who drive or take transit, reported a study of consumer spending in British towns: £91 each week, versus £64 among drivers and £46 for train passengers. Some of these shoppers are locals, but walkable downtowns also draw travellers, another source of revenue for cities. Plus, as businesses get stronger, the city earns more property-tax revenue.
If you believe in the Tao of urban studies theorist Richard Florida, who gained a global following by arguing that the fate of cities is linked to their ability to entice members of the so-called creative class, there is yet another payoff. Six in 10 Americans say they would choose to live in a walkable neighbourhood, either central or in the suburbs, if they could. Florida, head of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, notes that walkable metro areas have above-average levels of highly educated people, higher incomes and more high-tech companies. “Walkability is more than an attractive amenity,” he writes. “It’s a magnet for attracting and retaining the highly innovative businesses and highly skilled people that drive economic growth.”
The city an hour down the highway from Baltimore holds some lessons too. In “Walk This Way: The Economic Promise of Walkable Places in Metropolitan Washington, D.C.,” Brookings Institution economist Christopher Leinberger and Mariela Alfonzo, a research fellow at New York University’s Polytechnic School of Engineering, argue that the 2008 drop in housing prices was not only the result of a high-risk, low-interest loan bubble bursting, but also the start of a “structural real estate market shift.” The biggest decreases were in distant suburbs; homes in central neighbourhoods held steady and, in some cases, increased in value. They attribute this to an emerging preference for “mixed-use, compact, amenity-rich, transit-accessible neighborhoods or walkable places… . The trend is swinging away from neighborhoods that contain primarily large-lot single-family housing, few sidewalks, ample parking, and where driving is the primary means of transportation.” Walkability is now a factor in two-thirds of home-purchasing decisions in the U.S.
This is leading the country to a predicament. Call it the residential cliff. There is an undersupply of small-lot and attached housing — a shortfall estimated at 12 to 13.5 million units — and a glut of about 28 million surplus large-lot homes. Builders have been slow to meet this new demand, in part because of the public- and private-sector barriers that complicate walkable development. Municipal policies, zoning ordinances and funding biases are blocking their path. High-density, mixed-use developments can be messy; banks and investors aren’t comfortable with the risk or the capital demands. Leinberger and Alfonzo consider walkability a mechanism that can boost a neighbourhood’s triple bottom line: profit, people and planet. Yet the real-estate finance industry, they write, “lacks the experience, institutional mission or even fiduciary latitude to appropriately consider walkable development investments or loans.”
The D.C. analysis makes several strong recommendations. Rewrite the zoning codes that are costly and time-consuming to overturn for builders who want to make walkable, mixed-use developments. Seek out and support neighbourhoods that are positioned to become more walkable; since the land mass will be small, the infrastructure costs will be minimal. Implement subsidized housing programs to compensate for the lack of walkable developments until the supply-demand mismatch can be alleviated and prices drop to more affordable levels. Bring private developers, investors, social equity advocates, the public sector and citizen-led groups into this conversation. “Considering the economic benefits,” write Leinberger and Alfonzo, “walkability should be a critical part of all strategic growth plans.”
North Americans drive roughly 50 times as many miles as they walk, says Todd Litman, executive director of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, in British Columbia. This is why the car has traditionally been at the centre of our transportation policies, he writes in a paper about the economic value of walkability. By putting the car on a pedestal, city planners undervalue non-motorized travel. They overlook the fact that non-drivers (and those who drive minimally) subsidize people who don’t think twice before getting behind the wheel. Regardless of how many miles you drive, the same percentage of your taxes goes toward road maintenance. Moreover, studies on traffic economics tend to concentrate on the length of a trip, ignoring factors such as the costs of vehicle ownership, road congestion and parking, as well as the health implications of motorized travel. Walking is often disregarded because it is seen as a lower-status activity. Because it is not championed by a powerful lobby group. Because it is easy to take for granted. You don’t even need a sidewalk to walk beside a road. The act can be ignored because of its universality. This is one of the reasons the Society of Actuaries wants exercise programs incentivized through health plans. Even though walking is free and easy, there is a perceived barrier. It’s hard to compete against sexy car commercials.
The personal cost savings from reduced vehicle use, however, are not easily dismissed. American households in car-dependent communities spend 50 percent more on transportation (about $8,500 a year) than those in more walkable neighbourhoods (less than $5,500 a year). The difference stems from fuel consumption, insurance, parking fees, car depreciation and other factors. Auto-dependent communities also use land less efficiently. Walkable residential and commercial developments require less space, less parking and smaller setbacks from the road to mitigate traffic noise and danger.
Litman’s spreadsheets, based on data from the U.S. Department of Transportation, peg federal, state and local government annual spending on roadways at $30.8 billion, $66.4 billion and $31.3 billion respectively, with an average of 3.5 percent of that funding — 0.6, 1 and 10 percent across the three levels — devoted to walking. And that’s without factoring in public expenditures on parking facilities and traffic enforcement. Bump government support for walking infrastructure up to 10 to 20 percent of total transportation resources, Litman writes, and the change in planning priorities will have a profound impact on the economic well-being of the nation. Sidewalks will teem with healthier, relaxed people with money in their pockets.
The Alliance for Biking & Walking report brings geopolitics into this discussion. The average American family spends 16 cents of every dollar on transportation, its second-biggest expense after shelter. When you consider the sources of the vehicles and gas they purchase, most of those dollars go to “foreign car companies, and to pay for foreign fuel.” Beyond energy-dependency concerns, there’s a simple reason to take notice of this flow: those dollars leave the neighbourhood.
Using data from the Internal Revenue Service, Joe Cortright looked at spending on gas and cars in the U.S. in 2010 and calculated that 73 and 86 percent of the spending, respectively, immediately left the local economy. Because New Yorkers rely on transit and walking more than residents of most American cities, the roughly $19 billion below average they spend on car travel translates into $16 billion “available to be spent in the local economy. Because this money tends to be re-spent in other sectors, it stimulates business.”
Christopher Leinberger also puts walking on a ledger. He highlights the disposable incomes of walkability-craving millennials and baby boomers (significant savings, no children to support) as a key to revitalizing the urban cores of America. As he writes in The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream, 100 million new households will form in the U.S. by 2025, and 88 percent will be childless. That’s a lot of spending money, and much of it is headed downtown. “The metropolitan area that does not offer walkable urbanism,” he says, “is probably destined to lose economic development opportunities.”
Portland, Oregon, where Cortright is based, is an urbanist poster child. The city of 590,000, with a metropolitan population of nearly 3 million, is known for its progressive politics, its 60 or so microbreweries and, despite the Pacific Northwest rain, an outdoor lifestyle. In some ways, Portland is a normal American city: its urban density is average, and traditional industries such as steel manufacturing and shipping play a significant role in the economy. But in addition to a strong public transit network, 8 percent of commuters bike to work, the highest percentage in the U.S., and Walk Score ranks it the 12th most walkable community on a list of the country’s 50 largest cities.
Portland has this transportation profile largely because of a pair of foresighted decisions. With support from the state, the city was an early adopter of the “skinny streets” philosophy, a movement calling for a reduction of roadway width requirements in municipal standards. Narrow streets reduce “speeding, vehicle crashes, street construction costs, pedestrian crossing distances, impervious surfaces (and therefore stormwater drain capacity), street maintenance and resurfacing costs, and heat re-radiation, which contributes to the urban heat island effect.” Our streets got fat not only to accommodate all the cars on the road, but also as a vestige of antiquated safety controls: so horse-drawn wagons could make U-turns, so fire engines could pass one another, despite better building materials and sprinkler systems minimizing the frequency with which these situations occur. Going on a road diet helps a city reap the benefits of increased pedestrianism.
Since 1980, Portland has also adhered to an urban growth boundary. This did not prevent sprawl. The boundary is porous. It has been expanded three dozen times, with thousands of acres added for housing and industrial land use. Still, it has limited the type of sprawl I frequently tromped though in Calgary and Edmonton. Which, as Cortright details in a white paper for CEOs for Cities called “Portland’s Green Dividend,” led to the number of miles driven per person peaking in 1996, with locals now driving 20 percent less than the average American. Vehicle miles — total miles driven divided by population — continue to increase as a whole in the U.S. The four-mile daily difference between Portlanders and other Americans, when coupled with rush-hour travel times falling by a dozen minutes each day, saves residents approximately $2.5 billion every year in vehicle costs and lost productivity. And much of that money, as in New York, stays in the city.
Portland’s atmosphere attracts young people. In the 1990s, the city’s population of 25- to 34-year-olds with a college education grew 50 percent, five times more than the national average. This is Richard Florida’s creative class, and it flocked to the city’s walkable, central neighbourhoods. In contrast to “white flight” to the suburbs 50 years ago, demographer William Frey calls this in-migration “bright flight.” Flourishing around this workforce, chicken-and-egg debate notwithstanding, there are now 1,200-plus tech companies in Portland. And 30 percent of all jobs in the city are within three miles of the central business district, placing Portland behind only New York and San Francisco in this category among the country’s 50 largest metro areas.
In the Greater Toronto Area, where traffic gridlock drains an estimated $6 billion out of the economy every year in travel delays and vehicle costs, the city’s chief planner has made walking the hub of her strategy to ease congestion. Historically, says Jennifer Keesmaat, a lot of planning decisions have been made by men who like big-vision, billion-dollar schemes. Subways! Freeways! The reality is that something as subtle as getting more children to walk to school will have a bigger impact on traffic. More than 20 percent of all morning rush-hour trips in Toronto involve parents driving their kids to school. “We need to rebuild a culture around walking,” Keesmaat says. “It’s a much more profound infrastructure investment than any roads or subway we can build.”
After dashing around the U.K. by train in the summer of 2013, I caught my breath with a hike along the rocky coastline of a remote peninsula in northern Wales. Walking is hardwired into British culture, like hockey in Canada: rare is the time and place it cannot be done, observed or discussed. I know a guy who was born and raised in the fabled Green and Pleasant Land. Until he was old enough to tag along, his parents had a standing date with a babysitter every weekend so they could go rambling in the hills and dales. This was serious business.
In Wales, walking has a particularly high purpose. It puts food on the table. Domestic travellers and international visitors made more than 28 million walking trips to the countryside and coastlines of Wales in 2009, according to a study by the Welsh Economy Research Unit at Cardiff University. Those walkers spent £632 million and were responsible for another £275 million of indirect economic activity. They kept 11,980 people gainfully employed in the tourist trade, as well as sectors as diverse as manufacturing and financial services, big numbers in a nation with just over 3 million people.
My five-day hike spanned a short section of the Wales Coast Path, an 870-mile trail that traces the country’s entire shoreline, making Wales the only country in the world with a footpath showcasing all of its seafront terrain. About 2.9 million people walked on the WCP between October 2011 and September 2012, spending £33.2 million on gear, accommodation, food, drinks and other amenities. On the Llŷn Peninsula, where I went, these expenditures help to keep farmers, fishers, grocery stores, bakeries, inns and pubs in business.
The WCP was completed in 2012 by blazing new trails, linking existing legs and installing signage. A £14.6 million construction push finished the project, and it will be supported by roughly £2 million per year in maintenance and promotional spending. These investments are not a hard sell for the Welsh government, which pegs the value of the goods and services generated by its natural environment at around £9 billion per year. Walking is seen as a key bridge between conservation and revenue. “While it is very difficult to associate monetary values to biodiversity and landscape,” the Cardiff University study concludes, “it has been possible here to assign monetary value to one set of leisure activities closely linked to the quality of regional environmental assets.”
In heavily populated and developed parts of the U.K., there is a much more contentious tug-of-war between environment and economy. To get perspective on this debate, I hiked to the top of a wee Scottish mountain with Joseph Murphy.
Murphy is the geographer who lives south of Glasgow, near the Ken Bridge Hotel, in the village of New Galloway. Born in England but of Irish descent, he trekked 930 miles up the west coasts of Ireland and Scotland in 2006, exploring his Gaelic roots. Along the way, the University of Glasgow environmental studies professor investigated the challenges and opportunities of sustainable development. Was community, he wondered, the starting point?
Murphy took me to the Merrick, the highest hill in southern Scotland. With his border collie Jed bounding ahead, we set out from the parking lot at Glentrool, a pretty green valley in Galloway Forest Park. Three hundred square miles of heather-clad hills and granite outcrops, home to red deer and golden eagles, this is the largest forest park in Britain. It’s also part of a UNESCO biosphere reserve, the first “new style” biosphere in Scotland, established to promote wilderness preservation, scientific research and sustainable development. The trail began beside a rushing brook, climbing through a carpet of ferny bracken, dwarf willow and juniper. Within a few minutes, we were in a forest of spindly Sitka spruce. The trees, planted a couple decades ago, would soon be cut.
The harvesting is largely mechanical and creates few jobs. But the majority of the timber is processed in local sawmills, with haulage and processing employing more than 500 people (nearly as many permanent jobs as the total touted by the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline in Canada). The Scottish Forestry Commission manages the logging and says conservation and tourism are given due consideration. This is not window dressing. The 850,000 people who visit Galloway Forest Park each year contribute nearly £16 million to the area’s businesses, propelling tourism to third place in the regional economy after forestry and agriculture.
As we rose above the spruce, a panorama of green hills and blue lochs opened up, and Murphy told me about walking the length of Ireland and Scotland. In Rossport, a village in Ireland’s County Mayo, he met a group of protestors camping outside the gates of a Shell natural-gas refinery that was under construction. A year earlier, five of them had spent 94 days in jail for blocking access to their land to prevent work on a high-pressure pipeline. Murphy sympathized with the protestors. “Poorly conceived development projects have been imposed on rural communities around the world for decades,” he writes in his book about the walk, At the Edge, “and at last we are learning to ask a simple but powerful question. Is the community doing development for itself or is development being done to it?” Ireland’s energy policy, he believes, is outdated: “Predict future energy demand and provide for it through large-scale projects.” Nowhere on his walk did he see any evidence of attempts to reduce energy consumption: thousands of new suburban homes and not a single micro-wind turbine, solar water heater or photovoltaic cell.
Four hundred miles north of Rossport, on Lewis, the largest island in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, he encountered a similar resistance campaign. Only there, crofters were fighting against the construction of a massive wind farm. A consortium of multinational energy and engineering companies wanted to erect 234 turbines on the moorland where locals cut peat not for export but to heat their homes, a harvest they have capably managed for centuries. In the face of cultural as well as ecological concerns — locals complained about the industrialization of their landscape, and the installation’s impact on rare and endangered birds — the wind-farm proposal was scaled down in size. Still, the £500 million project, which would have supplied 10 percent of Scotland’s electricity, was rejected by the government over concerns about its impact on a globally significant peatland.
Today, a new small-scale wind farm on the Isle of Lewis is seeking financing. There will be three turbines, owned by the community. The electricity will be sold to the national grid, and the revenue will support local development. “This project is about power, but not just electricity,” said the chair of the development trust helming the proposal. He calls it a “quiet revolution.”
The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment. So said Gaylord Nelson, the former Governor of Wisconsin and Democrat senator who organized the first Earth Day in 1970. “All economic activity is dependent upon that environment and its underlying resource base of forests, water, air, soil, and minerals,” he wrote. “When the environment is finally forced to file for bankruptcy because its resource base has been polluted, degraded, dissipated, and irretrievably compromised, the economy goes into bankruptcy with it.”
Twenty-eight percent of greenhouse-gas emissions in the U.S. come from transportation. Passenger cars and light-duty trucks account for more than half of the sector’s total. Only electricity generation burns more carbon, one-third of the national output, 80 percent from coal. There are threads to tease out — cars emit more exhaust when their engines are cold, magnifying the value of making short journeys on foot — but no need to dwell in these pages on the environmental virtues of consuming less energy and polluting less by travelling under our own steam. It’s an easy way to start to make a difference. And conceptually, walking can help elucidate the symbiotic relationship between environment and economy. Especially if one encounters a series of intertwined issues on a single journey.
Contemplating the gas-refinery and wind-farm conflicts as he slowly advanced north, Murphy came to see that in the 21st century, colonialism and imperialism can be defined as the projection of power across space, such as when the periphery is exploited for the benefit of the core. Remote communities are invited to join the fight against climate change by building very large wind farms, even though the energy and profit generated is typically piped far from its source. Even though we don’t seem to be serious about reducing energy demands. This, Murphy told me, can be considered colonization of the future: “Our current generation is imperilling the ability of future generations to live reasonable, comfortable, acceptable lives. We are exploiting the future as a periphery.”
But when you walk from core to periphery, you link the two places in a comprehensible way. You see problems — and opportunities — at a human scale. You see the impact of government and corporate decisions that are made hundreds of miles away. You see the historical evolution of a region and get a glimpse of what its future might hold.
Murphy and I reached a narrow ridge and followed a stone wall to top of the Merrick. The Irish Sea’s North Channel was a hazy blue line to the west. Murphy had never been to the peak before. He scanned the horizon and spotted a few turbines here and there. “Well, that’s nice,” he said. “We’re not ringed by wind farms.”
Puzzling over Murphy’s words in my home office months later, the lucidity of the mountaintop was hard to conjure. Not only because of the prescription-pad illegibility of my shorthand. Our brains, remember, work differently when we are on foot — a phenomenon that has not gone unnoticed in the business world.
Walking three and a half miles around his New England neighbourhood every morning helps the president of Advertising for Humanity, Dan Pallotta, rehearse speeches and come up with new concepts. “The first mile of my walk is just a racket of competing voices of judgment and to-do lists,” he wrote in one of his regular blog posts for the Harvard Business Review. “But after about two miles, no matter how low my mood may have been at the outset, those voices settle down.” Apple chief executive officer Steve Jobs had his most serious conversations while walking. Louis W. Sullivan, U.S. Secretary of Health in the early 1990s, went for walks with colleagues while visiting his agency’s regional offices. He learned about policy debates and morale within the department, and staff got to meet the boss, something many had never experienced during their long careers.
Jobs and Sullivan practiced a habit known as MBWA: management by walking around. It was first popularized in the 1950s by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, founders of the eponymous electronics company, and became a buzzword in the 1980s after the publication of the blockbuster business book In Search of Excellence, whose authors called MBWA the “technology of the obvious.” With email replacing face-to-face contact in many offices, casual desk-side conversations can help managers connect with employees, and encourage staff to become more engaged. As long as the walkabouts are regular, and not an attempt to surprise or snoop, they can help foster a more cohesive and communicative organization. “If you wait for people to come to you, you’ll only get small problems,” said American management consultant W. Edwards Deming. “The big problems are [revealed when] people don’t realize they have one in the first place.”
The walking meeting, a natural fit within our free-flowing mobile business culture, goes further. A few years ago, when Silicon Valley executive and entrepreneur Nilofer Merchant had to discuss something with a busy colleague, the other woman suggested they talk shop while walking her dogs. It was a revelation. “You can take care of your health, or you can take care of your obligations,” Merchant says about time-crunched corporate culture in a TED Talk, “and one always comes at the cost of the other.” The average North American sits for 9.3 hours each day, and it’s killing us. Merchant now covers 20 to 30 miles in walking meetings most weeks.
As with beat cops in North Philly, these sessions produce ancillary benefits. The moderate activity gives you energy, and the fresh air and natural light can stimulate more creativity and open dialogue than the fluorescent je ne sais quoi of a shut-in conference room. “Getting out of the box,” says Merchant, “leads to out-of-the-box thinking.” By realizing she did not have to choose between her fitness and her professional life, she has come to understand that business problems don’t have to be seen as a battle between opposing choices. What’s more, incorporating exercise into your nine-to-five is a way to integrate physical health into your everyday life and stop treating it as a separate activity that gets dropped when your schedule becomes too crowded. You see your life as a continuum, not a scattering of chores to complete.
Instead of lecturing about wellness inside a classroom, University of Toronto health communication specialist Margaret MacNeill, who had cautioned me about the medicalization of exercise, takes student doctors and nurses outside to walk and talk. Hierarchical barriers fall and ideas flow. “It’s a wonderful icebreaker,” she says. “Your metabolism revs up and sparks your brain cells.” Small groups, quiet routes, comfortable shoes and a subject that requires minimal note-taking (such as the start of a project) are the keys to an effective session. Leaving your smartphone behind helps too.
Daniel Kahneman isn’t convinced. The Israeli-American psychologist, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002, believes that while it is pleasant to walk and think at the same time, these activities compete for resources from the part of the mind that guides our deliberate and logical decisions. “If I must construct an intricate argument under time pressure,” he writes in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, “I would rather be still, and I would prefer sitting to standing.” When accelerating above strolling speed, his ability to draw conclusions is impaired. “A mental effort of self-control is needed to resist the urge to slow down. Self-control and deliberate thought apparently draw on the same limited budget.”
Most of us adhere to Kahneman’s belief. When we get busy, we hunker down at our desks. This is a high-risk practice, considering the long-term health impacts of so much sitting. Yet we are creatures of habit.
My schedule got tight when I stopped travelling and reporting, and began to actually write this book. Juggling magazine assignments and domestic duties, I had little time to walk. I sat and sat, and reverted to frequent, short runs along Ottawa’s Rideau River to relieve creative and parenting pressures. (The knee surgery had worked, though I remain skittish about folk-music festivals.) Then I got a mysterious skin infection, possibly caused by an insect bite, that made my right hand swell like a steak. Doctors gave me intravenous antibiotics in the emergency room over three days and sent me home with an ambulatory infusion pump, which shot drugs into my arm every eight hours. A tangle of plastic tubing was affixed to my hip in a fanny pack. I could not run. So I tried a treadmill desk.
The concept is simple: a tall desk, a flat treadmill. An American company called LifeSpan loaned me one of its sleek, grey TR1200-DT5 models. It has a sturdy, adjustable-height tabletop and a speed range of 0.4 to 4 miles per hour, so users can comfortably type or talk, the thinking goes, without risking sitting disease. DIY units such as the archetype built by Mayo Clinic obesity researcher James Levine in the 1990s have evolved into today’s calorie-counting, Bluetooth-equipped commercial models, with prices in the $1,000 to $5,000 ballpark. Treadmill motors are designed to work optimally at slow speeds for long hours. But I wondered, settling into my ad hoc basement workstation and setting a clip of 1.5 miles an hour, would I actually get anything done?
Like most freelancers, I started my day with email correspondence, Twitter and other vital online business (such as renewing my driver’s licence). After 45 minutes on the machine, I forgot that I was walking. My lower back and feet hurt, so I raised the desktop and swapped my slippers for a pair of running shoes.
Two hours later, the pain was gone. Sweating slightly, I attempted to remove my hoodie while in motion. Bad idea. The safety key clipped to my pants stopped the belt before I tumbled into the wood panelling. I managed to write a few hundred words, but swayed drunkenly when I stepped off for lunch, as if disembarking onto the dock after a boat ride.
A couple of early afternoon phone interviews went well. Conversation was no problem at that pace, though my longhand notes were worse than usual. By the time I powered down, I had covered 8.8 miles and burned off 716 calories. A productive first day.
“Chairdom is hugely affecting humans,” Levine said to Susan Orlean of the New Yorker, both on their treadmill desks while talking. “No one has really understood what we have lost by sitting all the time.”
Although Levine and Orleans are tread-desk converts, research on the effectiveness of working while on a treadmill leans toward Kahneman’s stance. University of Tennessee exercise physiologist David R. Bassett had graduate students do a range of office tasks while seated and while walking one mile per hour on a treadmill. Not only did subjects drag and drop with a mouse faster and type more quickly when seated, they also had “meaningfully” better math scores. Their ability to pay attention and reading comprehension scores did not change when they were tested while walking.
I kept the treadmill desk for a couple months, experimenting with various speeds and alternating between the basement and my office chair on the main floor. Maybe it was the natural light or fresher air, but I worked better while sitting. Cosmopolitan editor-in-chief Joanna Coles reads at and loves her treadmill desk, but she also has plenty of space for an old-fashioned desk in her corner office on the 42nd floor of the Hearst Tower in midtown Manhattan. For me, productivity upstairs earned more time outside. On the machine, I felt the cognitive bottlenecks described by Kahneman. Besides, is it really walking if you don’t go anywhere? Treadmills, a friend grumbled, are hamster wheels for humans.
After I shipped the unit back to LifeSpan, Ottawa’s coldest winter in 20 years settled in. Stocking up on long underwear and embracing the snow and ice, I had learned in Alberta, is the best way to stay warm and stave off seasonal gloom. I found myself looking for excuses to get outdoors. A quick online search netted somebody who could help.
Andrew Markle, a tall, slim man in his early 30s, meets me outside a café on a busy corner. He opens the rear door of his plastic-interiored Honda Element. There is a basset hound slobbering in the front passenger seat. Spence has to ride shotgun, Markle explains, otherwise he will pee.
Markle and his wife, Brecken Hancock, own a dog-walking company called Walk It Off. She is a poet and he writes science fiction. She also does policy work for the federal government. They wanted to start a business when they moved to the city in 2012. A year after launching, they had a waiting list. At $19 per walk for a five-days-a-week package, Markle earns as much as Hancock would if she kept his hours.
I sit down in the car and meet the rest of my fellow passengers: Zermatt, a red retriever; Finn and Pixie, goldendoodles; Franklin, a bull mastiff; and Fanny, the smallest, part beagle, confined to a travel carrier because she always wants to wrestle. Ollie, Markle tells me, driving toward his secret forest in the suburbs, is on vacation.
My friends get restless when we curl off the highway. Markle stops on the wide shoulder of a rural road. He clips all six dogs to leashes, which are attached to a heavy-duty carabineer on his belt. We walk along a snowy path into a thicket of leafless oak and maple. After a minute, he lets the dogs run free. They romp in the snow: running, jumping, barking, digging. This is no fenced-in, inner-city doggie compound. It is a restorative place. I picture a class of schoolchildren bursting through the doors for recess — or a group of office workers set free from their cubicles.
The dogs do their business and Markle bags it. Fanny and Franklin play tug-of-war with a branch, growling. We do a two-mile loop, about average for an outing. The trees and a series of ridges block the wind. Spence needs a treat to be convinced to stay with the pack. “C’mon, buddy,” says Markle, “hustle.” Back in the car after an hour, Spence rests his neck on the gearshift and falls asleep.
Since starting Walk It Off, Markle has been driving more than ever. But he listens to audiobooks while on the road, and travels in that smooth window between morning and afternoon rush hours. His clients, nine-to-fivers mostly, don’t have the freedom to spend an hour in the woods with their canine friends in the middle of the day. We can’t all have jobs like Markle. We can’t all afford to work part-time. But there is a movement afoot to inculcate the four-day workweek. More time to take care of ourselves and our families; more jobs for other people. So, what’s wrong with a four-hour workday? Markle savours the balance he has: freedom, exercise, decent remuneration, creative satisfaction on the side. While he’s not exactly opting out of the rat race, he hasn’t jumped in, either.
“What’s your favourite thing about this type of job?” I ask just before he drops me off.
“It pays well and it’s only a half day, so I can also work on other things that I’m interested in,” he says. “And yeah, the walking. That’s probably the best part.”