When you think of the most walkable cities in America, buzzing metropolises such as Washington, D.C., New York City and Boston probably come to mind. But even the city of Mount Hope, W. Va., a tiny Appalachian town with a population of approximately 1,500, has feet hitting the street.
And that’s thanks to Walk [Your City] (WYC), an online tool that allows anyone to create their own signs to promote walking and biking in their communities. For example, you can make a sign that says downtown’s only 32 minutes away on foot or one that says that a beautiful mural is only a 5 minute bike ride away. TreeHugger notes that WYC’s signs (which cost about $25 each) also include a QR code that provides walking directions and also keeps track of who is using them.
Mount Hope plastered these signs around a 2-mile stretch in their downtown in July 2013, and it’s already left a positive impact. Mayor Michael Martin tells WYC that the signs remind residents that it is not too far to walk to their destinations, and they also help change minds about the safety and acceptance of walking. (Check out the video below.)
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Sure, it’s easy to jump into your car for a quick trip to the convenience store, but as WYC reminds us on their website, a whole 41 percent of our daily car trips require less than 20 minutes of walking. Sometimes it just takes a small reminder that walking somewhere over driving is a lot better for your health (and for the environment too).
The WYC project, since it started in Raleigh, N.C. in 2012, has grown to more than 45 states, six continents, and 38 countries.
You can create your own walking sign at walkyourcity.org/signbuilder.
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Tag: walk
These Navy Veterans Are Making an Epic Pilgrimage to Raise Money for Wounded Soldiers
When Austin Shirley of Plano, Texas completed his service with the Navy, he felt at loose ends, unsure about his plan for future and how to reintegrate into civilian life. So he decided to take a year to dedicate himself to helping fellow veterans. He sold all of his possessions, stocked up on gear at REI, and began to walk across the country with his dog Archer to raise money for Wounded Wear, a nonprofit that increases awareness about injured veterans and provides them with clothing adapted to their physical needs, or shirts that just lets passersby know that the wearer was injured while serving the country.
(NationSwell profiled the nonprofit’s founder, Jason Redman, earlier this year.)
Shirley began his journey, which he calls the Chasing the Sun campaign, last October in Jacksonville, Florida. Along the way, he called his friend and fellow Navy vet, Bryan Cochran. Redman told Ryan Van Velzer of AZCentral that Cochran told his friend, “Times are tough. I lost my job and I’m in a veteran’s shelter right now.” So Shirley invited him to join his mission, and they’ve been walking together since Shreveport, Louisiana. The vets’ goal? To raise $50,000 for Wounded Wear. By the time they arrived in Phoenix on April 25, they’d raised about $30,000.
Redman told Van Velzer that the two walkers have been sleeping in a tent along their journey. “Ninety percent of the time they find a spot off the road and they sleep in the tent and they’ll stop at small stores along the way and gather food. Also along the way they meet a lot of amazing, interesting people who offer to buy them food and say, ‘Hey, you can sleep here tonight.’ The generosity of the American people is a pretty amazing thing.”
You can follow the vets’ progress on Facebook, and show some of your own American generosity by donating to their campaign through Crowdrise.
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Why Salt Lake City May Become the New Leader in Public Transportation
Salt Lake City seems like an unlikely candidate to be a pro-public transportation city. Cars are king in the capital of Utah, where city blocks are long and streets are an unusually wide 132 feet — a measurement Brigham Young allegedly described as enough room to turn a wagon team without “resorting to profanity.” With much of the majority-Mormon city shutting down on Sundays, pedestrians struggle to transverse the Rocky Mountain-backed landscape.
Which is why Robin Hutcheson, a new executive-board member of the National Association of City Transportation Officials, is becoming something of a Salt Lake City rock star: She’s instrumental in diversifying transportation options in the metropolitan area of 1.2 million to include bike lanes and a commuter rail line. And the measures she’s taking could provide a crucial blueprint for other urban centers.
Atlantic Cities profiled how Hutcheson is harnessing Salt Lake City’s increasing friendliness to public transportation. She’s been head of the transportation planning division of Salt Lake City since 2011, and is a biker, runner, and all-around public-transit devotee. With the help of state and city investments into public transportation, more pedestrian-friendly streets, and business and church cooperation, Salt Lake City has self-adapted to the idea of reducing reliance on cars.
The reason doesn’t just lie in ease of movement, it’s about the environment, too. Salt Lake City suffers from visible smog, and has been named one of the ten worst cities in the U.S. for short-term particulate pollution by the American Lung Association. “As the air-quality issue has risen in the public eye, people are accepting that we need to do more than just say we’re going to do better,” Mayor Ralph Becker told Atlantic Cities. “It’s about people being able to move around in their city without having to use their car. How do we get from where we are today to having a city where people easily get around, can drive if they wish, but that isn’t their only or necessarily their best option?”
Enter Hutcheson. Her initiatives include a new low-cost transit card called the Hive Pass that allows holders unlimited access to buses, light rail within the city, and commuter trains for only $360 a year. Others, like the rail line connecting Salt Lake to Provo that opened in December 2012, caused public transit ridership in Utah to rise an astonishing 103 percent. TRAX, the city’s light rail system, saw its ridership increase 6.8 percent last year and a current plan calls for two more lines to open by 2015.
Meanwhile, Hutcheson and her team have also been working hard to make Salt Lake a more welcoming city for people on bicycles and on foot. Last December, a streetcar line with a walking and biking trail alongside it opened in the rapidly-developing Sugarhouse neighborhood. The city also has a seasonal bike-share and are designating new bike lanes in town. Salt Lake has been granted a budget for bike and pedestrian capital improvements that will be about $3.5 million for 2014-2105, a marked increase from just under $500,000 in 2009.
With Hutcheson making a positive imprint all over Salt Lake City, so is her city’s chapter of the Women’s Transportation Seminar (WTS), which she founded. The organization itself was established in 1977 for the professional advancement of women throughout the transportation industry — from road engineers to airline pilots. Her perspective on public transit is partially shaped by WTS, which believes that women have an unmatched lens into what commuters need. For instance, they have an acute sense of the dangers of a long wait at a dark bus stop, or traffic patterns when driving children back and forth between activities.
With or without her WTS foundation, one thing is for certain: Hutcheson’s work in Salt Lake City is likely to have reverberations in cities across the country.
This Incredible Man Walked 34,000 Miles to Raise Awareness About Depression and Suicide
For Steve Fugate, life is all about the journey — literally.
Walking more than 34,000 miles, Fugate has successfully crossed the continental United States seven times to raise awareness about depression and suicide. The 67-year-old’s message is simple, and it’s scrawled across a sign he always carries with him: LOVE LIFE.
That’s the message he wishes he could have imparted on his children. His son committed suicide in 1999. His daughter, who suffered from MS, succumbed to an accidental drug overdose just a few years later. “When I lost my son, I forgot about all other plans I had,” Fugate said in a short film for Korduroy TV. “So I walk.”
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Fugate’s LOVE LIFE Walk started shortly after his son’s death. During each cross-country trek, he tells himself that this is the last one. Yet, he keeps going. Last March, he left his hometown of Vero Beach, Florida, on his eighth adventure. His fans — thousands of them — keep up with his journey via Facebook. “I love Facebook. I go on there and it’s a way for me to get to more than just who I meet on the road,” Fugate says. “And it’s also a way for me to let people know that life is not what these newscasters have grabbed from all over the world to scare the living crap out of you. It’s a way for me to show people that random acts of kindness to happen to me on a daily basis — sometimes numerous in one day.”
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Indeed, it’s the kindness of others and the desire to find what he’s looking for (whatever that may be) — “I’ll know when I get it,” he says — that persuades him to keep walking. He’s walked through rain, hail, snow and sleet. He’s climbed mountains and been stalked by a mountain lion. He’s set up camp near tracks left by a grizzly bear. Five times, he’s struggled to cross the desert, each time proclaiming that he will never do it again. Yet he keeps going. “My creed is to mend the broken heart while still beating,” Fugate says. “I’m forced to keep walking with this LOVE LIFE sign because every once in awhile someone stops and they need it.”
But he’s not just healing others through his walks. He’s healing himself, as well. “I call what I do trail therapy,” he says. “It’s just like every other trail. It goes both ways. This isn’t just for others. This is for me too.”
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