Post by the Scribe on Apr 24, 2020 10:45:16 GMT
whitehorsewalks.com/about.html
We're the envy of many places and yet we seem to have little culture of walking. It's not that people don't walk, it's more that there is little community focus on walking. Apart from missing out on fun walking events, such as a walking festival, we miss out on community-building opportunities. When the city looks at subdivisions and other developments, at various plans and by-laws, at creating committees and task forces, there's generally no public advocate looking at things from the broader point of view of walkers.
Our focus on vehicle-dominated travel and its need for more and bigger roads and more and bigger trails comes at the cost of more air pollution, more fossil fuel use, more environmental degradation, and generally, poorer walking opportunities. A lot of the city's trail and greenspace consultation work over the past couple of years has had a motorized vehicle focus, both ATVs and snowmobiles. Cars and their road needs dominates budgets.
Modern electronic lifestyles make us more sedentary, less healthy. The cost of health care is rising and governments encourage us to live healthier lives. Walking is a versatile, free, fun, healthy activity that most people can do. We need to make our city more walkable — developing our walking culture by creating better walking opportunities only makes sense.
This website is an attempt to try to change some of this. As part of trying to create a walking culture, I'm making a reference tool for walking in Whitehorse: ideas that would make walking better; an overview of how the city is structured, which departments look after trails and greenspaces; places to walk, walking guides; ideas for making a stronger walking community; examples from other places. For change to happen, people need to lobby mayor and council, the business community, their friends.
I don't want the focus of the site to be prodding the city to incorporate a walking vision, but rather to be encouraging others to get out and walk. So, there's a lot of stuff about what you'd wonder about when you travel at the pace of a walker: mountains, animals, plants, for instance.
Started Feb. 27, 2012 by Peter Long, last update April 2, 2014.