Less than 25 percent of Americans walk for more than ten minutes continuously in a typical week
Less than 25 percent of Americans walk for more than ten minutes continuously in a typical week
made the rounds on twitter today and I have to say, christ alive
almost every part of the country is a web of hostile architecture and islands between which only cars can flow readily.
True enough but it also points to a cultural problem. That is 500m / 0,3 miles of walking at the low end. That is "not taking your car from one side of the strip mall to the other"-territory and similar cases.
i grew up in a shithole american suburb, one of those housing developments with no sidewalks, no streetlights, just an enclave of cheap houses 4 miles up a 55mph canyon road with no shoulders. it was literally impossible to walk to any type of shop for the first 22 years of my life. i hated it so much i put all of my life's energies into getting the fuck out and living somewhere urban. after getting priced out of one metro area, we were able to relocate somewhere cheaper and buy a home. now, i measure how good my weekend was by how little i needed to drive. i've got bars, shops, and
restaurants within 1 mile in every direction. it really is a blessed existence. i work with suburboids who are too scared to go on walks. if it isn't a walk from the parking lot to the store, or up the driveway, to their house, they won't do it. i desperately want to visit one of those european cities that was developed before the existence of the automobile so i can experience life how it was meant to be lived - locally, on two feet.america is a deeply sick place.
i work with suburboids who are too scared to go on walks. if it isn't a walk from the parking lot to the store, or up the driveway, to their house, they won't do it
This picks up two points I that are dear to me and they're both just "it's also very much a cultural issue". Both on the suburban anxiety disorder and also on the part of how 10 minutes of continous walking is very well within territory of walking to two stores from the parking lot without moving your car. Fuck, some of them driveways in the US, probably.
It is an issue of infrastructure, absolutely, but you have to negatively incentivize people out of cars or they'll never stop, because that's like asking them to take a hot air balloon to whereever they're going. It's just not an option for them.
My relative was an exhange student in the US in the 70s and has told me that one of the problems she ran into with the host family was the way she would just go for walks and jogs around the area by herself. This was somehow super dangerous and unheard of, she said the area was just a basic suburb.
It's an entirely different outlook on life.
My favorite thing about going to new cities is learning the various transit/bike-share options and getting to explore. Having a car always feels so fucking limiting and I hate it. Unless there’s a scenic spot I wanna go to specifically that requires driving, I’ll avoid it, it’s just so liberating to not have one’s existence tied to operating a machine.
Honestly, I’m not here to dunk on Americans. This is unquestionably an act of violence porky has done to the American working class.
True. I felt this necessary posting on account of this site also can get shamefully carbrained at times and I do believe a lot of it is US-Americans unaware of how fucked their situation is, because to them, it is just normalcy
This is a bad headline. Here's a couple important bits from the article:
the majority of previous studies done on physical activity primarily focused on its use in recreational activity or leisure time activity, he noted.
less than one quarter of U.S. adults in a nationally representative sample reported walking or bicycling for transportation for more than 10 minutes continuously in a typical week.
So this study is intentionally focused on walking and biking "for transportation", and excludes people who do either activity for recreation or exercise or any other reason. I myself would have probably reported that I do zero walking or biking for transportation to this survey - but I get between 90 and 120 minutes of total walking almost every day walking my (very energetic) dog.
I just took the title from the webpage. The situation is not as dire as that suggests, albeit, not once walking 500m a week for transportation needs once a week is still pretty fucking dire.
I do think it's bad, but it outlines a problem with walking infrastructure. In many places, you really can't get anywhere by walking. For example, a friend and I had to take a quick trip up the road and on the way realized that we should add a stop to our trip to get two things done at once. Place A and Place B are very close to one another, but we could not walk from one to another because there was no walking path, and there were bushes and ditches blocking the only way. We weren't going to go around those and into 50-60 mph traffic on foot. So we drove. Left the one parking lot by car and went into the second parking lot. The entire trip we may be got 50 total steps.
But I think shows where the problem is - to walk in US you need to have make conscious effort and usually drive yourself first to some park. Meanwhile dumbass American smart watch thinks that I am training every time I walk from work to my favorite eatery for lunch.
Also no mention of bikes in the title seems odd. I certainly don't walk for transportation because things are too far, so I assumed I was part of the 75% it was talking about, even though I go through periods of using active transport as my primary method of commuting. Wish clickbait was not so prevalent.
Isn't a typical grocery store trip more than 10 minutes of walking? This seems pretty hard to believe.
As others have pointed out
less than one quarter of U.S. adults in a nationally representative sample reported walking or bicycling for transportation for more than 10 minutes continuously in a typical week.
This data is probably excluding things like walking around work or grocery shopping and looking at just walking/bicycling to get from point A to point B in lieu of cars or trains. They explicitly use the term "active transportation" here.
Walking where I live has an LD50 of like 40 minutes.
The survey seems like it's only concerned with walking when it's a means of transportation
Grocery pickup is free in most places and delivery is insanely popular.
oh yeah, that's real. in my family of ~5, I'm the only one doing that. I'm the eccentric one.
pointing out that this low bar is a recommended baseline for maintaining mobility and cognition among the geriatric is not well received.
legit, if they walk more than 200 yards, they act like they're on a literal death march.
My hot crank take theory is that all the stuff about "ergonomic sitting" is just bullshit pseudoscience. You're just not meant to sit for 8 hours in a cubicle and no amount of lumbar support is going to fix the underlying problem.
My even hotter crank theory is that much of geriatric mobility issue is caused by just becoming sedentary. We somehow recognize being a couch potato is bad for you, except if you're over 60, at which point any movement kills you or whatever.
somewhere in my early 40s I decided I would work to develop all the positive habits a very healthy elderly person would have.
I try to never rush, and instead be methodical. no high impact shit that is tough on joints. no more knock around b.s. or high intensity stuff. wear the kneepads, the gloves, the helmet, etc. squat to work low. take breaks, don't cut corners.
I am saving up to get myself into a situation where I can have a little sauna or steam shower for a daily sweat too. it's probably a few years away still, but I'm looking forward to it most of all.
anyway, I figured if I laid the foundation for this sort of lifestyle and general approach to maintenance now, the psychological transition to being legit old as fuck would be gentle, assuming I manage to show up. I came up with this olan watching a lot of older boomers trying to fight old age and, inevitably, lose more than they wagered; fast and hard with a lot of ego-driven grief. I see myself as a realist: I can picture how I end up, best case, so I figure I might as well start puttering on over there while I can make choices about the pace. Valhalla ain't real.
the irony is, my colleagues think I am like 10 years younger than I really am because all these mostly easy little moves accumulate and seem to slow what we think of as aging.
My even hotter crank theory is that much of geriatric mobility issue is caused by just becoming sedentary. We somehow recognize being a couch potato is bad for you, except if you're over 60, at which point any movement kills you or whatever.
As I understand it that's also why broken hips have such a high mortality rate: the injury itself isn't particularly dangerous, but even with a hip replacement regaining mobility is difficult and painful and if someone doesn't manage it they'll be bedridden and suffer a pretty rapid decline over the next year or so.
I know 60-70 year olds that play tennis every day and go on 50+ mile bike rides (non e-bike). Mobility is very much use it or lose it.
When my wife and I visited my parents out in the country, she was adamant about us keeping up our walking routine. But there is just no place we could find to walk. The small country roads have too many logging trucks (and no sidewalk), the only place to go are hiking trails but my wife wanted to get steps in and not hike up a mountain, so it wasn't her thing and that's understandable.
In the end we just walked around the yard for an hour each day avoiding fire ants and ticks. One day we just went to a Wal Mart and walked for an hour. And we definitely got stares and remarks from our family. Seeing someone walk around is just out of this world for them, and it makes sense given the environment completelt stacked against it.
And this discussion about walking and geriatric health hits real hard because my mom is constantly depressed and sits inside all day. I try to kindly nudge her and ask if she had gone outdoors any and she always says "no". But I know that even if she wanted to go outside, there are just very limited options of places to casually walk around in. You'd have to drive 40 minutes to get to a small park where you can walk around the little league baseball field.
Just a very hostile place all around. It's sad
Probably walk around with the explicit intent to just walk around for, like, cumulatively an hour or more a day. How the fuck are you people not understimulated at the time you go to bed. Is this some neurotypical magic I'm not privy to?
Sure, there’s walking in stores. But essentially: walkability is a luxury for the rich here.
I can write a whole essay on this. Americans themselves aren’t necessarily bad people, quite the contrary. Americans love touching grass and walkable cities and all that cool shit, but it’s so expensive because there’s such overwhelming demand and the ruling class isn’t interested in expanding things. Many Americans are awesome people, but damn are American
s the porkiest porks to ever pork.People are influenced by their material circumstances. People don't walk, cause US society isn't built for that.
You should notice your confusion, read the article, and realise the headline is deeply misleading.
They are only counting walking for transportation. Not e.g. shopping, recreation, during work etc.
In general a good reflex when hearing something outrageous is to believe your own doubt as to the truth, and investigate. Media flourishes selling outrageous half truths and nonsense. 7bicycles was also deeply irresponsible copying this headline without context.
Large swathes of America are effectively houses next to interstate highways. There's no where to walk to lol.
I have lived on both sides of it. Poor communities are not afforded the luxury of walking places
nowhere to go
Yep. No sidewalks, a 45mph road I would have to walk next to, nothing to walk to, and zero public transport. I have to use a car to do anything. Shit sucks.
real
Don't you have to do this just for grocery shopping? Like I know some people do the online ordering but just walking around Walmart takes like 20 minutes even if you're just shopping for yourself.
The study focuses on transportation and as the blurb reads I think this excludes being inside a walmart or similar as being in a place instead of transporting from one to another. Still fucking dire though
That's not very much walking
Scheisse, I walk or run 20-30 minutes a day in the UK, and that's still less than ideal.
Pretty sure this puts you well within the german recommendations about this at least to the level of "won't just fall apart at 40"
A week is abysmal… But it’s as you say, most people with desk jobs are in an office park or some bleak suburban corporate zone. In order to have basic daily (or in this case, weekly) physical activity you really have to go out of your way to do it for the sake of itself. My mom has to walk laps around her office building.
I’m glad I’ve mostly moved away from field work at my job but I’ll do it gladly when they need me just so I don’t have to spend 100% of my time at a desk behind a screen.
Sometimes I wonder if my fascination with the idea of arcologies is just a desperate yearning for walkable neighborhoods.
The superblocks in Barcelona are the future ancestor of the arcology
public transit gang stays winning
Just saying, you know public transportation is a good idea when porky only wants places with public transportation all to rich people exclusively.
Whew! Good thing I'm not American!
and half those 25% are just college students and new yorkers
In completely unrelated figures, 45% of American households have a dog.
oh god
Not even a little surprised by this. Most american dog owners keep their pet as a status symbol / emotional support object. Americans love the idea of owning a dog, not the reality of it.
Kids even more so
And I've gotta say, all my dog walking neighbors I run into are much more friendly than the ones with dogs that never leave their yard. One in particular had issue with me not using a leash on my property with a 12 year old lab (before i put on the leash and left the property), they have two dogs and literally just let them out the door holding the leash inside. Nasty people
Could roughly work out to the 25% of Americans that walk for more than ten minutes being the dog walkers of those households.
That's not how statistics works. Even if the 10m walkers are maximally represented among dog-keeping households (instead of more evenly distributed), with no more than one walker per dog household (also extremely unlikely to not be clustered), at most 50% of dogs get walks from their owners.
Also, I have 0 dogs and I walk/run/bike 30-150 minutes a day.
A member of my family is one of these. After her last one died (which she also never walked), she got a puppy. It's going on 6 months now, a puppy who hasn't been on a single walk yet.
Animal abuse nation.
Those dog must be so badly socialised. Jesus Christ, those poor animals. No wonder they run away and get lost all the time. I would run away as well.
There are lots of streets where if you walk down the sidewalk, someone's dog will start barking at you, and then the other dogs along the block will hear it and all start barking at each other, this can go on for a surprisingly long time.