Why don't you walk?

OK, I know most of you do walk. At least you know how. But when was the last time you walked to get groceries? When did you stroll from your house to a restaurant? When did you walk to a friend's house that is more than a block or two away? When did you last walk to church? (I knew a man once who drove to church in reverse each Sunday. He lived so close it was easier that way.)

When was the last time you took a walk that wasn't solely intended for exercise?

I have been writing for newspapers for nearly a quarter century now, and one theme keeps reappearing. City planners keep coming up with ways to design walkable communities, and people keep driving them crazy — in their cars, that is.

It's instructive to remember that more than 30 years ago, Salt Lake City invested a lot of money in a downtown redevelopment project designed to encourage pedestrians. The city hired an architectural firm from Chicago to redesign Main Street, then spent most of 1974 building it. Workers narrowed the street and widened the sidewalks, taking away all the 45-degree parking stalls. Then they planted trees along the sidewalks.

Then, of course, the city attracted two large, enclosed shopping malls right across the street from each other — leading one merchant to tell me years ago that between the loss of parking and the giant sucking sound of the malls gobbling shoppers, he lost nearly all his customers.

And not necessarily because they walked away.

The March issue of the American Journal of Public Health helps us understand our western aversion to walking. Turns out it's not really our fault. Researchers at the University of Washington looked at what motivates senior citizens to get out and walk more. An Associated Press account said the trick is to build densely packed neighborhoods where people have a grocery store, a bar or a restaurant within a half-mile of their home. One woman said living where she could walk to the places she needed to go "made me much happier and undoubtedly healthier."

So, there you are. All we need to do along the Wasatch Front is build communities like this — dense housing and lots of cozy little businesses.

That ought to be easy. Getting folks to move there, however, may not be so easy.

I like to jog around my South Jordan neighborhood. A grocery store sits less than a mile from my house. But you can count more airplanes overhead than pedestrians navigating the stark sidewalks. You also could tax your math skills counting the new houses sprouting like toadstools after a rainstorm.

An Australian newspaper put an interesting perspective on this. In Perth, said the West Australian, people began moving to single-family houses on large lots 100 years ago to avoid infectious diseases. Then when septic tanks appeared, they moved farther apart to avoid contaminated groundwater.