Suddenly Frugal Blog

It is American Education Week at my daughter’s school, and parents were invited to observe classes today. I wanted to make sure I had enough time to get settled in her 5th grade classroom and figured I would just drive to the school to stay on schedule. But then I remembered this Associated Press story I’d read yesterday in my paper, and I rethought my decision to drive.

Here’s the basics of that piece (I found an online version of this AP story at Yahoo! Green, in case you want to read it I didn’t even know there was a green version of Yahoo!).

If Americans spent 30 minutes each day walking instead of driving, we would achieve the following:

* cut the annual U.S. emissions by 64 million tons
* save about 6.5 billion gallons of gasoline
* shed more than 3 billion pounds

I already walk each morning for my daily exercise, thanks to my dog (a recent American College of Sports Medicine study of dog ownership showed that dog owners walk longer than canine-free walkers–and that dog owners tend to be trimmer). However, I was not going to risk not fitting into my Levis, just for convenience’s sake. Besides, with gas near its all-time-high where I live (about $3.30 a gallon), I’d rather not waste away gas on short hops like these. I was not taking the lazy-person’s way out. Plus, the school is about 8/10 of a mile from my home, which really isn’t too far to walk. In fact, in New York City terms, where one north-south Manhattan block equals 1/10 of a mile, 8/10 of a mile (or about eight city blocks) is not very far at all.

(Addendum: A kind reader pointed out that my math and scale above is incorrect. One north-south Manhattan block is actually 1/20 of a mile, which means that in walking 8/10 of a mile or .8 miles, I’m walking the equivalent of 16 city blocks.)

So given all of this–walking being good for you, gas being so expensive and the school not being really too far a way–here’s what I did: I just built in some extra time to arrive at the school when I was scheduled to be there, and in doing so I built in 30 or so extra minutes of walking today–about 15 minutes there and 15 minutes back.