We should be allowed to walk 1 Km around our homes.
Most of the micro / small businesses, neighborhood trading, and community enterprises happen 1 Km around the center of each family.
Lockdowns are not working on a global scale. Maybe it is time for redesigning them.
Nowadays trends are related to "walkable cities" and "big" communities. The more we travel, the more we increase the temperature of the cities; therefore, the more we walk, the more we are healthy and sane.
Cars are expensive in two senses: one is their fixed costs of buying one, and the other is the variable cost associated with taking care of them as expensive "babies". Electric cars, out of tax incentives, are not much cheaper but at least probably pollute less.
On the other hand, having the chance of walking around the home and the neighborhood is cheap in two senses: it saves human capital via physical and mental health maintenance, and it creates local development via small family businesses that interconnect communities, creating better relations, more social capital and saving travel costs (e.g. commuting).
Quarantine, Walking, and COVID19
The whole policy that is applied nowadays is linked to the old normal of cars, offices, metro, buses, business traveling, and the policies normally come dictated by countries developed in that sense: big buildings, big streets, big cars, big expenses, and big debts. The two major economies, China or the USA, both have followed that model.
Other countries, or even communities inside countries, like The Netherlands, UK, Italy, Costa Rica, Chile, and Ecuador, have developed trails for biking, shopping by bike, and walking around the historic "centrum" of the old heritage of their cities.
It has been demostrated that walking to the grocery store can save your life. "A study from the American Cancer Society followed 140,000 older adults and reported that those who walked six hours per week had a lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, and cancer than those who were not active, but that walking even as little as two hours per week could begin to reduce the risk of disease and help you live a longer, healthier life."
“Our bodies were designed to move,” said Dr. David Agus, Professor of Medicine and Engineering at the University of Southern California.
"In Amish communities in North America, one study showed that the average woman logged 14,000 steps per day and the average man logged 18,000 steps per day, and both genders averaged about 10,000 on their day of rest. These Amish communities also had the lowest rates of obesity of any community in North America. This study eventually hit the media and began the movement to reach at least 10,000 steps per day" (1)
We do not expect to live as Amish, but we expect to live. Walking not only for exercising but for saving the economy is what we need in times of COVID19. We should be left free by the state to organize ourselves with responsibility, take care of business, create relations, trade among us, and create the new normal that now is not happening because we are forced to relate to each other only via screens.
Cars were ok, screens also are ok, but we need communities and family businesses. Governments should hear, in special those ones in developing countries, where our strength is in the model of doing business in the community.
Dear authorities: let us free to walk and trade!
BAN THE EXCESS MORTALITY, NOT THE HUMAN LIFE!
* Roberto F. Salazar-Córdova is CEO of
HEXAGON GROUP LATAM/UK/GLOBAL
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