Imagine McHenry County: Talking about Walking

Imagine a place where people can walk to the neighborhood store to get a carton of milk. A place where many kids can walk to school, walk to the pool, walk to the library. A place where folks walk to the bank, walk to the train, and even walk to work.

Okay, all this thinking about walking everywhere is making me tired! But, in a way, that's the point. Walking is exercise - and I know just one person who doesn't need more exercise! In other words, we can all do with a bit more walking in our daily lives.

Well, one of the interesting things that emerged from the Imagine McHenry County survey and public forum last year was that people want walkable communities. Sixty-three percent of people who attended the public forum thought it was very important to give people more transportations options, including to make communities more "walkable."

This notion actually correlates with another item that was identified as important to local residents: the ease of getting around by car, with 67% of survey respondents saying that this is important to them. Additionally, 82% of survey respondents thought it was going to be a big challenge in the future to have a county where it is easy to get around by car.

While some folks in some places seem to think that the answer to traffic problems is more and wider roads, it seems to me that more people are realizing that this old-fashioned idea of walking might be part of the answer. Again, 63% of the people at the IMC public forum thought it was important to create more options for moving around the county, including designing more walkable communities.

It is a fact that there will never be enough money - local, state, and/or federal - to build the roads that people want. There isn't even enough funding to maintain the roads we have today! We need to find new ways of solving the traffic problem - we can't expect to just throw more money at it.

I'm working from home today while new windows are being installed upstairs. Mid-morning, I took a break to walk to the bank. Our bank is 5 blocks away, and on my way there, I passed a grammar school, the high school, a rental shop, and a gas station with a convenience store. It occurred to me that I actually live in a walkable part of Harvard.

Thinking a bit beyond my walk to the bank, it occurs to me that a drug store, a hardware store, a pizza parlor, a diner, an ice cream shop, our auto service station, as well as assorted other small businesses are all within eight blocks if I walk in the other direction. I don't have to get in the car to visit any of these places.

The sad fact is that I rarely walk to any of those places. I hop in the car. It is much quicker. And, on a different day, I might have driven the five blocks to the bank. But not today. Today, I noticed that the weather was beautiful (70s, low humidity), plus I wasn't in a hurry to go somewhere. So, today I walked.

And I'm glad I did. I learned something. Or remembered something that I knew once upon a time.

When I was a kid, I walked to and from school - grammar school and then high school. I walked to the corner drug store for candy (or sometimes to buy cigarettes for my parents, but that's another story). I walked to my friends' houses. I could even walk to the beach - it was about a mile away, but it was an easy walk. My brother walked to the local barber. There was even a toy store near the drug store, and we walked there. We walked to the train station to meet Dad when he came home from work. And he walked to the station in the morning to catch the train into the City.

I know what you are thinking, and I'm just not that old!

This walking was a part of life in many "inner ring" suburbs of Chicago just 30 years ago.

Maybe it's time we remember how to build our communities like that again?