How walkable is your neighbourhood?

Olive wants to know, how walkable is your neighbourhood?

One of the most effective ways to reduce your carbon footprint, not to mention trim your waistline, is to ditch the car and walk to where you need to go. However, the farther away you live from amenities, the more likely you are to drive to them. Walkscore.com has created a site that evaluates your neighbourhood, based on its walkability to local amenities.  It includes your distance to restaurants, coffee, groceries, shopping, schools, parks, book stores, pubs, entertainment, banking, and more. It also identifies the local transit options in your area, and gives you commuting times based on walking, bicycling, driving, and bussing. Interestingly, it tells you how much to expect to pay each month on gasoline, if you do choose to drive, probably because driving almost always has the smallest commuting time and they want to discourage you from driving, despite that fact.

            My neighbourhood rated 67 out of a possible 100 (the best score), and is considered “somewhat walkable”, according to Walk Score . Closeness to groceries is 0.88 km, to a park is 0.29 km, to a coffee shop is 0.92 km and the nearest pub is 0.82 km away. I am also very close to many bus routes, so bussing is quite easy from my neighbourhood. So, what does this mean for my neighbourhood? It means that we are somewhat sustainable. We are pretty centrally located in terms of bus or car transportation, but we lack a density of amenities within a comfortable walking distance. For example, about four large blocks away from my house is a bakery. It is a lovely Italian bakery, which serves heavenly smelling loaves and an assortment of delicious baked goods, gelato, and coffee. I don't go there often. Why? Because I have to walk four large blocks and can get only brewed coffee and bread. If I decide that I need milk, too, I've got to walk about five more large blocks to get to a grocery store, and they are not along the same route from my house. Perhaps if there was a little dairy shop, a butcher shop, a veggie market, and a pub/liquor store on the same corner, I would walk there more frequently. By concentrating several necessities in one central, convenient location, our neighbourhood could lower its overall carbon footprint, as people would have a nearby 'village center' to shop in. 


    Previously, the neighbourhood grocery store was in a mini-plaza that had a video store and pizza shop beside it. When that was the case, we walked more often, because we could go have a few slices of pizza for dinner, pick up a movie, and buy dessert and a few groceries all at the same location. Since then, the grocery store has expanded. It has taken over the spaces that were once the pizza shop and video store. Now all you can get in that plaza, are groceries. I guess its not really a plaza anymore, but simply a large grocery store. It used to be a place that people could go and congregate, now it is strictly an in and out shopping facility. With that change our community has lost some of its sustainability. Now, instead of sticking near home, people go elsewhere to eat and congregate; thus, our local sustainability is reduced.

            While Walkscore.com is a useful tool to determine how walkable a neighbourhood is, it admits that it does not factor in several key elements in determining whether or not people will want to walk in their neighbourhood.  The first is street design. People need access to sidewalks, and crosswalks. They will often not want to walk in areas with high speed limits. Secondly, safety while walking, such as crime rates, street lighting, and traffic accident frequencies, play a key role in whether or not people walk or drive. Topography is also an important determinant in whether a neighbourhood is actually walkable. My neighbourhood has a grocery store less than a kilometer away, but we hardly ever walk there. Why? Because there are two hills between our house and the grocery store, which make it annoying to walk when we are carrying heavy bags of groceries. Weather is another factor which can make walking lovely, or horrible. Victoria has a high frequency of rainy days, which can make walking with groceries pretty miserable.

      One thing that Walkscore.com did not mention was the family size factor. In my opinion, this could play a fairly large role, because the larger your family size is, the less likely you are to walk to get certain amenities, such as groceries. This is because the more people you are shopping for, the heavier and bulkier your load will be, and the less likely you will walk. Walking seems to be best for short trips to pick up a few bags of things or less, or to go to some sort of social activity or entertainment, such as a pub. It is also worth noting that, as a dog owner, I am always interested in having nice places to walk and play with my dog. A good walkscore should also include the esthetic quality of the neighbourhood, which directly relates to the pleasantness of walking there, and the proximity to dog-friendly parks and trails.

     This year I will graduate from University and will also be facing a big move. I now plan to incorporate walkscore into my new home decision, as a way to reduce my overall carbon footprint.

Calculating my Ecological Footprint

     Have you ever wondered what your ecological footprint is? I know I have. I live my life in what I would consider to be a reasonably sustainable way, am a student of the environmental sciences, hope to dedicate my life to developing solutions to the global warming crisis, but have never actually assessed my footprint on the earth.

     In order to calculate my ecological footprint, I used the http://www.myfootprint.org/ calculator. The settings I chose were for Calgary (the only option for a Canadian city), detailed, and adult. My result was 5, which means that I require 5 global hectares of land to support my lifestyle. If everyone lived my lifestyle, we would need 2.8 planets to sustain us! This is absolutely appalling! I knew that living in a western nation came with a higher footprint, but I didn’t realize it was this large.

     However, there were a few things which I think skewed my result. First of all, I carpool to school every day. The transportation section did not have a way to take this into account, it merely asked how often you drove alone. The calculator is also set up for Calgary, which has one of the highest ecological footprints of any Canadian city. I think that if Victoria, or even BC were options, that my overall footprint would be decreased. In addition, the calculator does not let you choose zero on several things, like how much you spend on natural gas per month. The lowest amount is $35.00, but I don’t use any natural gas, so it gets included in my footprint, even though I don’t use any. It also does this for the amount spent per month on non-food consumables, such as clothing, books, and technology. Since I very rarely buy these things, the calculator adds to my footprint the manufacturing of things that I am not consuming. Another factor to consider is that my city is located on an island. Most of our food is transported from the mainland, so it adds an extra negative ecological impact to most of our food.  The calculator is also set for a national level services footprint. This means that if certain provinces or cities are bad environmental offenders in the services area, every Canadian is stuck with a higher services footprint, and thus a higher overall footprint. The Canadian average is 5.8 global hectares per person, and the Calgary average is 8.6! In comparison to these averages, I am having a smaller global impact than many Canadians; however, if large polluters such as Alberta and Saskatchewan were not included in the Canadian average footprint, I wonder how much lower mine would be from the national average.

So what are the implications of my global footprint? Well first of all, we don’t have 2.8 planets to live on, so my lifestyle is obviously not even close to sustainable! This is especially disturbing when you take into account that I live more sustainably than many Canadians. For instance, I recycle everything I can, I drive a Smart car, I carpool to school, I eat meat only a few times a week, and try to buy all of my fruit and vegetable produce locally. I live in a smallish house with four other people. I am in a province that produces primarily hydroelectric power, so a large portion of my electricity is from a renewable energy source. I take short showers and only wash laundry once a week. All of these things could be considered fairly sustainable, but yet I still need 5 hectares of land!

The frustrating part of this exercise was that I tried testing out the differences between my current lifestyle and a drastically different lifestyle, and the results were pretty similar. Right now I live in a freestanding house with three other people, collectively the household uses a fair amount of electricity. I share a Smart car with my husband and eat an omnivorous diet. If I became a vegetarian, lived in an apartment building, drastically reduced my electricity consumption, and got rid of my car, I would reduce my footprint to 4.1 global hectares. That is still high enough to need 2.3 planets to sustain a world full of people living like me.

This demonstrates the complex nature of the global warming crisis. It is one thing to convince people to reduce their overall consumption, to get them to bike more, carpool more, recycle and use energy efficient appliances, but is this actually enough to create a sustainable world? The answer, it seems, is no. Unfortunately, I don't know what the solution is to this problem. Perhaps, by changing the way that we generate energy (through renewable sources), by changing the way the we obtain our food (locally and minimally processed), by changing the way that we travel (electric cars or other green technology, bicycling, and walking) we can change our overall global impact more effectively.

            As a final note, I tried footprint calculators from other sources, such as the WWF’s Eco Guru  and got similar results. For example, the amount of planets we would need if everyone had my lifestyle was 2.4 for the Eco Guru calculator.