Walking to Work

I live within walking distance to work, about a 35 minute walk uphill, through the university arboretum (with its signs, "Reunite Gondwana"), through the greenspace meadow, across a few parking lots and up to College 8, which houses my office and my department. I seldom walk, mostly bus but sometimes drive, the 1.5 miles up to campus.

This would not be as much of a problem if I weren't part of a group of professors establishing a "sustainability curriculum" on campus. In lecture after lecture, I am reminded about the fact that walking is good for me, that driving is bad for the environment, and that by taking the time to walk instead of driving, I would make a contribution to sustainability, fighting global warming, and lessening the huge traffic problem on campus. When the Campus Sustainability Coordinator speaks in our introduction to sustainability design class, she hammers the point home: our university carbon footprint comes from all the driving and flying professors do. If we could just convince professors to stay put, or to walk or bus or bike, we could make real progress in carbon reduction.

Which is why, whatever method I'm using to get to campus, I generally spend that time thinking about how to make it more possible to get there a better way. I keep thinking that, rather than providing disincentives by making it expensive to park on campus and hard to find a parking space when I do drive, perhaps the university should try to eliminate the obstacles to my walking, busing and biking to campus. Disincentives are annoying by definition and so as I drive to campus and notice how hard they make it to do otherwise, I take to a constant internal grumbling of "if only they would..."

A few years ago, the university actually responded to my internal grumbling (which I would occasionally express outwardly in various university transportation surveys). They put in a campus bus that passed close to my house every 15 minutes or so. When I get it together to step on the bus, a sense of peace falls upon me, I breathe more deeply, and maybe even smile as I thank the busdriver for picking me up. It seems almost perfect. Thank you! But this bus only works when classes are in session, 30 weeks a year. I work many more weeks than that.

But on those days when I walk, rushing because 35 minutes out of my day is a lot of time, I grumble. Why do they make it so hard to walk, with all the fences surrounding the university? Why can't I just walk straight up or down between my home and my office? Why did they take out the ladder fence that used to be there when I first arrived on campus, enabling me to walk a much more direct route? Why do I have to go out of my way and take extra time to walk around to the entrance to the arboretum? Why is it so unclear whether or not it's legal to bike through the arboretum to the bike path (much easier for my 51-year-old body than the alternate bike-path entrance)? Why is the greenspace so lacking in people and therefore so isolated that I feel the need to put up my female-at-risk antenna, the ones I grew when, in the early 80s, the Trailside Killer was my Glen Park, SF neighbor who stalked exactly this landscape? Why does the Trailside Killer have to have anything to do with the question of sustainability?

These are the sort of things I have thought about during my walks, although a kind of positive "unintended consequence" has recently saved me from growing my risk antennae quite so vigorously: the arboretum folks are taking over the meadows and "managing" them for specific landscape restoration goals. As a result, the path I take through the meadow is now lined with 12 foot deer fences, to keep deer from eating the new plants they have planted in the meadow. Because I have heard (from victims) the stories of how attacks have happened in places a lot like this (the person in the bushes waiting to step out and grab the unsuspecting off a trail) the presence of these fences is remarkably soothing to me. They make me feel, at least, that it would be tough for anyone to step out and grab me off the trail. Fortunately, rapists are not built like deer, who are not at all deterred by this new, tall obstacle. I always see them grazing inside the fence, eating those young plants.

The real reason I drive, investing in a day permit, at least once a week is the fact that I'm not just a driver, I'm a trucker. I "truck" in the traditional sense that my jobs (as professor and mother) require that I move things around, like computers and books for work and children for that other work of motherhood. If my leftie city had a schoolbus system the way many more conservative cities do, I would almost never need to drive to work. The university used to provide a bus system for my books as well, delivering them to my department mailbox. Despite their new dedication to lowering the school's carbon footprint, this policy will only force me to drive more.

Then there's the institutions involved at the other end of my kid pickup. If I felt confident that my daughter could safely walk from her school to my husband's office downtown, he and I wouldn't have to join the traffic jam that is constant at the intersection between downtown and the industrial park where her school is located. I realize that we are squandering carbon for what may be an overly middle-class mom concern for our daughter's safety, but I don't see too many other 13-year-old girls walking alone around this industrial park. I've asked the school to help me form a walking partner group, but school administrators have lots of other things on their minds. Their green committee has created a carpool list, but my daughter's schedule changes all the time; we haven't had the consistency to use it. Walking would be the flexible solution.

In the thin European vs. fat American discussions, it turns out that the amount of walking Europeans do is as important or more than differences in diet. When I get the chance to walk somewhere, it would be great not to have to think the whole time I'm walking, "Why can't I do this more?"