Among so many different ways of transportation invented by modern technology, the most convenient way will always be walking. With walking, people do not need to spend time waiting for buses, own the transports like bicycles, also people do not need to worry about the pollution which is inevitable when people are driving a car. However, nothing is perfect, so here what I am going to talk about is the strengths and weaknesses about walking.
What bothers us most nowadays? Transportation issues! The government and the public were finding ways to reduce the air pollution, energy consumption, and congestion, as well as revitalize downtown areas and to promote mobility for the carless since 1960s. Specifically, according to Susan Hanson's "the Context of Urban Travel concepts and Recent Trends"(Page 24), American government spent more than 11% of the U.S. Economy on the department of transportation on 2003, so the main point is what the government spent so much money for. Firstly, it is clearly that transportation, except for walking, is really a major consumer of energy, including fossil fuels like petroleum, gasoline and labor. Also, government needs to spend a lot on build new roads, broaden old roads, and repair broken roads. However, what does walking cost? Obviously, walking is still a major consumer of energy for us, but what we need to provide the energy is just live our regular lives. Moreover, which pollution or congestion will walking lead to?Apparently, unless there are so many people parting in a small place, I do not think walking on the street will cause pollution or congestion.
Also, walking in a short distance to reach somewhere is a perfect sustainable transportation example. According to Preshn L. Schiller's "An introduction to sustainable transportation: policy, planning and implementation"(page 2), "walking in a short distance meets the basic access and mobility needs of individuals and societies to be met safely and in a manner consistent with human ecosystem health and it is affordable, and operate efficiently." Also, the patterns of transportation and urban land use,which is associated with high levels of automobile dependence, present many environmental, economic and social problems for the sustainability of cities. For example, the problems include oil vulnerability, urban sprawl, photochemical smog, acid rain, high greenhouse gases(global warming), noise, neighbourhood severance, visual intrusion, physical danger, decimated transit system, poor transit cost recovery, high proportion of city wealth spent on passenger transportation, congestion costs, high urban infrastructure costs for sewers, water mains, public health costs from air and other pollution, health costs from growing obesity due to sedentary auto lifestyles, lose of urban land to pavement, loss of productive rural land, loss of community in neighbourhoods, loss of street life, loss of public safety, anti-social behaviour due to boredom in car-dependent suburbs, enforced car ownership for lower-income households, isolation in remote suburbs with few amenities, access problems for those without cars or access to cars and those with disabilities, and physical and mental health problems related to lack of physical activities in isolated suburbs. Although walking can not solve all the problems above, choosing walking as the first choice of transportation will be effective for most of them and reduce their degree.
However, the biggest problem for walking is that walking holds a small mobility. As the distance between two places becomes longer and longer, it is much more exhausting going to one place from another by walking than by other transportations. For example, according to Susan Hanson's "the Context of Urban Travel concepts and Recent Trends"(Page 17) in 1997, American logged 4.6 trillion passengers miles of travel by all motorized mode, and 92% of those miles were by automobile; this total amounts to more than 14,000 miles of travel per person per year. (U.S. Department of transportation, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, 1999, pp.35-37). That distance is truly impossible by walking. Here is a website which assesses the walkability score for any addresses: http://www.walkscore.com/ . This website provides people whether they can take walking as their first choice of transportation or not. For example, if I type in the towers residence hall in Georgia Tech, I will get a walk score of 88 out of 100, which indicates it is very walkable here.
In my opinion, walking is and will be the most basic transportation way which can not be replaced. If people want to get onto a bike, a car, a bus or a plane, they need to have some distances walking. Hence, although the technology nowadays is well-developed, people will never forget what they do for transportation by born ------ walking.
Work Cited.
Hanson, Susan. The Geography of Urban Transportation. 3rd ed. Susan Hanson and Geneviene Giuliano. New York: Guilford Press, 2004
Schiller, Preston L. An Introduction to Sustainable Transportation: Policy, Planning and Implementation. London: Earthscan, 2010.
