How Walkable Is Your City?

The plan was to take a rideshare from the Manchester Grand Hyatt to San Diego International. Three miles. Thirty bucks. I checked the weather, looked at the harbor, and decided to walk it instead.

The Embarcadero trail runs almost the entire way. It's wide, flat, and loud in the best way — sea lions barking, halyards clinking, families on rented bikes weaving past you. You pass the USS Midway, the seaport village, the cruise terminal. By the time you get to the airport, you've walked through what feels like an entire downtown's worth of good urbanism before you ever see a baggage claim sign.

Then SAN does something most American airports don't: it has a designated walking and bike path right into the terminal. Public art along the way. Wayfinding signs that assume you're a pedestrian, not a confused driver. It is, I want to stress, an airport.

When I got to the curb, I noticed something I hadn't expected: the bike racks and lockers were packed. Not "a bike or two leaning against a fence." Packed. Full lockers, every rack used. People were commuting to the airport on two wheels.

That's not an accident. You don't get full bike lockers because cyclists are scrappy. You get full bike lockers because somebody made the call, years ago, to spend money on infrastructure that invites people to move. Shout-out to whoever ran that meeting.

When you make the active choice the easy choice, people take it.

I've now walked from a hotel to an airport in seven cities. San Diego is the only one where I genuinely felt the city was on my side the whole way.

I was in Indianapolis in February. The Indianapolis Marriott Downtown is on West Maryland Street, about a block from the convention center. I had a free morning, the temperature had clawed back up to "tolerable Midwestern winter," and I needed breakfast. Patachou — a local cafe a coworker swore by — was only a 0.2-mile round trip. I walked it.

Later that day, I ventured across town to visit a gift shop and came across the Soldiers' & Sailors' Monument — a 285-foot limestone obelisk in the middle of a roundabout. It works like a downtown compass: you can be five blocks away in any direction and still know exactly where you are.

The walk over was cool. The sidewalks were continuous. The crosswalks gave you enough time. Office workers and students moved past with their Hoosier sweatshirts on, eyes down, making good time.

Patachou calls itself "a student union for adults," which is somewhere between a tagline and a confession. I had a green omelet, a slice of avocado, sourdough toast, arugula — earned, even on a short walk.

In a walkable city, exercise stops feeling like exercise. It just feels like getting on with your day.

I live in metro Phoenix, which means most of the Valley grades out somewhere between "you might survive crossing this six-lane stroad" and "no." Tempe is the exception, and the exception is almost entirely thanks to one piece of infrastructure: the Rio Salado Pathway along Tempe Town Lake.

The lake itself is a feat — they dammed a section of the Salt River bed in the late '90s and produced a two-mile body of water in the middle of the desert. The path along it is paved, flat, and continuous. It connects ASU's campus, Tempe Marketplace, Mill Avenue, the Tempe Center for the Arts, and a half-dozen apartment complexes that lined up to be there for a reason.

I've used this path with my kids a lot. One day on motorized scooters; bikes on several other occasions, including a stretch where we rode the river pathway all the way down to the airport. On my own, I've walked from the Mill Avenue Bridge across to the Tempe Town Lake Pedestrian Bridge more times than I can count — a few of those were walking events I either organized or joined.

On any given evening you'll see everything: rowing, sailing, biking, rollerblading, scootering, jogging, walking, and people just sitting around relaxing. Step off the corridor and the spell breaks fast — but that's the point. You don't need a whole walkable city to change a person's habits. You need one walkable corridor that connects the things they actually do.

A single great path can be the difference between a sedentary week and an active one. That's not metaphor; that's the data.

If you live within a ten-minute walk of Tempe Town Lake, your odds of meeting weekly physical activity guidelines go up — quietly, by default, without any New Year's resolution. That's the whole game.