The people-powered commute

The daily commute is a well-worn subject of complaint. Driving is expensive, aggravating and isolating. Cars pollute. Traffic jams rob free time and peace of mind.

But for some workers, the commute is the best part of the day.

Dave Schumacher, 54, a transit planner at SANDAG, leaves his Bay Park residence at 5:30 a.m. Two hours and seven miles later he arrives at his downtown office. In good spirits. His means of transport?

His feet.

“I really enjoy it. It’s a quiet time,” Schumacher said. “It slows the pace of life down. I get to do a lot of really great thinking.”

For about fifteen years, Schumacher has been walking 45 commuting miles a week. He rotates through three pairs of shoes at a time to extend their longevity, keeping an ear perked for athletic blow out sales to make his annual nine-pair demand. Brand names are better, he said, which may be unfortunate in terms of cost, but it beats the price of gas and it is after all, to protect your irreplaceable foot.

A backpack filled with hydration fluids and an iPod prepped with podcasts accompany him on his journey. He walks the busy, “uninteresting” Morena Boulevard, up the steep slope to Mission Hills, through Hillcrest and finally to his office where he showers and changes his clothes.

Schumacher finds the older neighborhoods easiest and most enjoyable to walk, though they tend to suffer crumbling sidewalks and outdated infrastructure. As a board member of Walk San Diego, he is interested in improving the city’s walkability or foot-traffic friendliness, because let’s face it, there are neighborhoods where even walking from one’s parking spot to one’s destination feels close to bodily or emotional suicide.

The problem is, we’ve somehow come to take this for granted, when it is actually the direct result of design, one that perhaps could use a few revisions. Road conditions, traffic patterns, residential density and safety influence whether a neighborhood’s sidewalk is anything more than a sturdy path to one’s car. Obviously, it doesn’t hurt to be a good looking neighborhood either.

Go to a medieval European city, built when walking was all the rage, and it becomes clear how a city’s infrastructure determines relations between its residents. People are doing what seems so impossible here. They are out in the streets. Talking. They actually get a chance to know each other in that nice, airy space between the binding social spheres of home and work.

Suburbs typically fail miserably at walkability because they were built at a time when walking seemed like a nice idea, (something to do with the family or the dog while bearing a smile) but ultimately anachronistic, unnecessary. Blocks and blocks of nice, big family houses make the car the only drawbridge back to civilization for anyone who doesn’t work and order all their sustenance off the Internet. We need destination points like coffee shops or grocery stores to give the would-be pedestrian a place to actually go, said Schumacher.

Cars, too, need to learn to be more polite to their pedestrian colleagues, because, as Schumacher said, “crossing a busy intersection in California is like crossing a freeway.” There’s a concrete way to do this, should the cars refuse to behave. Several years ago, La Jolla Boulevard received a set of roundabouts to keep cars from gleefully bulleting through Bird Rock, terrifying anyone not surrounded by metal and airbags to dip even a pinky toe into the road. Now mothers can calmly push strollers to and fro Starbucks while their children gaze up at the sky.

But walkability is not just about making neighborhoods pleasant.

Jim Sallis, a SDSU researcher, is demonstrating that a community’s walkability directly affects its residents’ health. His eight-year, NIH-funded study found that those living in walkable communities receive an average of 35 to 45 more minutes of exercise a week and are less likely to be overweight than those who lived in less-walkable communities. The results were consistent across both high- and low-income neighborhoods, a significant observation as residents in low-income neighborhoods tend to be more affected by obesity.

“Forty extra minutes of activity a week is a tremendous amount of (burned) calories if you count all the years you live in the neighborhood,” Sallis said. “We want to put walkability even higher on the city planners’ agenda.”

Zoning codes, those incomprehensible, mile-long lists of rules that state what kind of building can go where, are one of walkability’s biggest foes. For some reason, maybe a good one, they tend to discourage or prohibit mixed use cityscapes. The result? The continual sprawl between residences and destinations. On a tour with San Diego planners, Sallis heard about the complications of the mixed-use developments on Fifth Avenue.

“Each one took 10 to 20 waivers to be legal,” Sallis said. “We need to change zoning laws because if a developer wants to do mixed use, he has to pay for it.”

Schumacher agrees. Because how else is he going to get out and about when he’s 70 and can’t drive?

“We’re really our own worst enemies. We’ve designed walking out of our communities,” Schumacher said. “Our only option is to drive. We should give people the choice.”

Schumacher turned to walking because it was a safer alternative to biking.

“I used to be an avid cyclist and biked to work,” he said. “But when I had kids and it was dark in the winter, a lot of near misses made me think about mortality.”

Death seems to be a common concern for those who leave the car out of their commute. Joel West, a graphic design teacher, commutes by bike from his South Park residence to the high school in Kearny Mesa where he works

“It’s scary, you have to be very defensive,” West said. “I work really hard to not get hurt. Drivers never think to look for anything but cars.”

West cites drivers using phones as the biggest hazard — one he hasn’t seen decrease much since the cell phone ban took effect. He’s learned to make eye contact with drivers and make noise or point at them to snap them out of their road dream. Car doors, rolling right turns and drivers exiting Fashion Valley are other daily hazards, but daily practice has snapped his awareness into shape.

West’s eight-mile trip takes about 45 minutes as opposed to 20 minutes in the car. Still, he finds cycling a time saver since the ride eliminates his need to spend extra time exercising or going out doors.

“You get into shape without even thinking about it and I definitely sleep better,” West said. “But the main difference is that I’m way less tired at work and after work. When I do the coffee/driving thing, I’m tired at work and want to take a nap when I get home but even though I get up earlier to ride, I feel way better when I’m riding my commute.”

West started commuting exclusively by bike about a year ago after his car broke down. He finally fixed the car, but it was too late. Even after a summer in cycling-enthusiastic Portland, West found temperate San Diego an optimal biking city. Plus, most of his destinations are only 15 minutes away. And it’s West, not his car-burdened friends that always makes it to events early. He never has to look for parking.

Cyclist Patty Mooney, 53, a video producer, wasn’t deterred after being hit by a car and sent to the hospital. In fact, instead of suing the driver, she took him out to breakfast after she recovered.

“I figured it was good PR for cyclists,” said Mooney, whose cycling motivation includes health (both hers and the planet’s) and a sense of freedom. “There are drivers that resent cyclists, though cyclists have the same rights as drivers.”

For example, a Los Angeles physician allegedly injured two cyclists in January by slamming his breaks in front of them. He told police at the scene it was “to teach them a lesson,” one that included broken teeth, a broken collar bone, a severed nose.

Still, Mooney, who commuted 15 miles a day on her bike for eight years before working from home, doesn’t let drivers intimidate her. Once, while riding near Home and Fairmont Avenue, someone threw a chain at her from a passing car.

Maybe it was the wind in the hair, maybe it was the thrill of a cyclist’s independence, but Mooney did not peddle quickly and quietly away.

“I should have taken their license plate, but I rode up, zoomed over to driver’s side and emptied my water bottle on the driver’s head,” she said. The car was full of shady-looking, tough guys, the type with bandannas and tattoos. For a second no one moved.

Then what happened?

“Oh,” she said. “They started laughing.”

Erin Glass is SDNN’s health and lifestyle editor.

Tags: SDNN

This entry was posted on Friday, March 27th, 2009 at 2:41 pm and is filed under Health, Lifestyle . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.