Our Desire for Walking
Welcome to the gita blog — this is where we will share our take on topics important to walkability, mobility, and how technology helps deepen our enjoyment of daily experiences. In our inaugural post, we want to talk about something essential to our raison d’etre: walking.
Let’s cover what you already know about walking. It is a pillar of physical and mental well-being. Walking keeps you active and moving while connecting you with your neighborhood and the great outdoors. As we spend more and more of our time on screens, the need for physical exercise and a physical connection to our environment becomes more important than ever. Walking bolsters mental wellness, facilitating social interactions — big and small — that are impossible to come by from behind the wheel of a car or from the backseat of a rideshare.
Walking is the most desirable mode of travel in the US
These benefits are hardly trade secrets. In fact, the 2017 US Census found that walking was the most desirable mode of travel — more desirable than riding a car, bike, train, or bus — by an overwhelming factor. But here’s what you probably didn’t know: even though we all recognize how great walking is and even though we all want to walk, we choose not to. That same Census found only 10% of trips in the US are walked — even when the trips are well within a reasonable walking distance! More than one out of every nine automobile trips taken in the United States is for a distance less than a mile.
At Piaggio Fast Forward, we believe that there can be more walking, and better yet, more walking in a way that enhances your daily routine. We’ve spent years perfecting a carrier that empowers us to use our own two feet instead of tapping for those two and four-wheeled alternatives. We’ve designed the gita robot to relieve us of life’s baggage and allow us to move head up and hands free. We’ve built a robot that allows us to be more human.
Whether you decide to walk with gita or go it alone, walking is the best means to a higher quality of life and more engaged communities. This is why “walkability” is a recognized metric tracked by local municipalities and realtors alike. In future posts, we will explore the thought behind walkable cities and how they will shape our future.
