Go Greener, Australia

This Friday is Walk To Work Day around Australia. The Pedestrian Council wants you to walk all or part of the way to work, or take a walk in your lunch break. You can register as an individual or a business at their website.

My office is organising a group walk, with a healthy lunch afterwards. I often catch a train and a bus to work, but was going to skip the bus section, which would be about a 15 minute walk. However, Friday is my day for jogging early in the morning, and I’m not sure I can manage a walk after my run! We’ll see how I go.

There’s several benefits to walking to work, or taking public transport.

• better air quality because there’s fewer cars on the streets: air pollution, such as smog, kills about 4,000 Australians every year
• reduced greenhouse gas emissions from traffic: each kilometre we don’t drive saves up to half a kilogram of greenhouse gas
• improved mental and physical health: exercise increases the levels of ‘mood lifting’ chemicals in the brain, lowers our risk of heart disease, and improves muscular and bone strength
• it’s also cheaper than driving: with the way petrol prices are going, it’s worth looking into the alternatives!

You can read more about the benefits on the Walk To Work Fact Sheet (pdf).

Maybe you could try the walk to walk as a test run to see if you could do it more regularly. Or use it as an opportunity to figure out the best combo of trains or buses for your regular trips. I’m a walker from way back, so I’m hoping to set a bit of an example for other people who might not realise how easy and fun it is. I’m just hoping that the weather holds out, and we don’t get any rain!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 at 4:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.