Essay Walking or Biking versus Driving a Car

Walking and Driving Walking is the motion of exerting energy. Driving is the usage of the foot to accelerate from the gas to the break or vice versa. How does walking compare to driving? Which one of the two gives a good feeling afterwards? Is there even a difference between walking and driving? Walking is using the human body to move from one place to another in a certain pace. Walking takes energy. To get energy, food and water is needed in the human body system.

To reach a certain destination, walking takes a pretty good amount of time. How is it that walking seems to take longer than driving, even when a person walks at Walking or Biking versus Driving a Car Transportation is the key to survival in our world today . When one is not equipped to travel to and from places in an efficient and timely manner , the repercussions can be severe . Some of the repercussions involved are losing your job or missing an important appointment .

This is why we always choose to travel by the fastest method available . Unfortunately , the motorized forms of transportation such as driving a car , holds tremendous negative effects for the person and our environment . We have also lost touch with the simpler , yet more enjoyable forms of transportation from our youth . I am talking about being able to take long walks , or riding my bicycle down the road to get to where it is I want to go . I remember when I was little and attending grammar school at the nearby public school.

I fondly recall that each morning , I would hurriedly get dressed and wolf down my breakfast and then my mother and I would walk hand in hand as she took me to school . I was able to bond a lot with my mother during that time . The most memorable times of my life were of taking walks with my mother as we did her errands at local merchants . Each afternoon, I would accompany her to the local grocer , laundry shop ,and other places and then , if I was a really behaved child , my mother would take me to the soda shop before we headed home.

When I got older ,my mother allowed me to walk to school with my friends and classmates . This made going to school even more fun for me because I got to know my neighbors and classmates before class . Going to school was not something I dreaded because it was like a game for me and my friends . These memories are things I treasure from my youth . It was only later on in life that I learned that by walking to my various destinations, I was not only making valuable memories , but I was also keeping myself healthy and fit by giving myself the best form of — walking.

By walking, I allowed myself to breath-in fresh air . The fresh air helped to clean up and strengthen my lungs in the process . I guess this is why even to this day , I always talks walks for nearby errands . I am also a member of an unofficial walking club that meets on weekends at the park for early morning walks . When I reached High School , I was suddenly thrust into a fast paced world that required a faster mode of transportation other than my two feet.

Admittedly , talking walks with my friends was great , but we could not afford to be late to school nor take separate buses to school either . The problem was solved when I got my first two-wheeled bicycle at the same time as my friends . I personally enjoyed this activity because it combined my two… The idea may sound absurd, but there’s a legitimate insight behind it. Walking burns calories, which come from food—and it takes an enormous quantity of fossil fuels to produce, process, and transport everything that we eat.

Add in the other GHGs from agriculture—everything from cow manure to emissions from synthetic fertilizers—and you’ve got a potent global warming cocktail in every glass of milk. But our doppelgangers at the Pacific Institute did their homework, compiling evidence about climate emissions from both cars and food. And they came to the conclusion that walking emits about one-quarter the GHGs of driving—earning a partial retraction from Tierney. (You go, PacInst! ) But looking at the numbers, I think that the Pacific Institute’s numbers are conservative.

In fact, I think that when I take a short walk, I’m being at least 12 times as friendly to the climate as if I drove. Your mileage may vary, of course; but my shoes get about 220 miles per gallon. Here are a handful of reasons why I think that walking look even more climate friendly than the Pacific Institute’s estimates suggest: What would a walker be doing otherwise? Walking burns calories, but a person also burns calories while driving, or just loafing around.

So what matters isn’t the total calories your body burns during a walk, but the marginal calories from walking vs. driving + whatever else you’d do with your time. CalorieLab gives some helpful clues: for a half-hour walking trip, they estimate that a 176 pound person (the average of the median weights for men and women in the US) burns about 106 extra food calories, compared with a 5 minute drive and 25 minutes of watching TV. This figure is slightly less than the figure the Pacific Institute used. And if you do anything more strenuous than sit on your butt for those 25 minutes, then the food-calorie “advantage” of driving narrows even further.