Week 5 Theme: Walking for Errands and Shopping Locally
Welcome to week 5, the final week of the Walk30 Burnaby/New West Challenge! Last week, we talked about walking for the environment. We hope you’ve had a chance to track your carbon footprint and see first-hand how beneficial it is to the environment to switch to walking and other active transportation modes! This week, we’re talking about walking for errands and shopping locally.
Why shop locally?
Small Business BC lists 5 reasons why you should do your shopping closer to home:
Support the character of your community: Small local businesses, and the people who frequent them, add a unique character and life to our communities. They employ our neighbours and friends, and they provide jobs within our neighbourhoods. Without them, we’d be unable to find many unique products and services that can’t be found at bigger outlets, such as locally-made artisan crafts and delicious homestyle foods!
Keep money in the community: LOCO BC’s evidence highlights that a small 10% shift in BC consumer spending towards independent businesses would create 14,150 jobs, while keeping $4.3 billion within the BC economy each year.
Keep people in our communities: Approximately 60% of our population lives in the Lower Mainland and Victoria metropolitan area, while the remaining 40% is distributed across the rest of the province. As traditional rural industries decline, and we move toward a more integrated global economy, these rural areas have faced challenges retaining their population and supporting local jobs. Supporting businesses in these communities is a great way to conserve these towns’ economies and keep people living there.
Community building: Local businesses are owned by local people. These people are your neighbours, friends, and family, or maybe even you! When you shop at local stores you might bump into people you know or even meet new friends. Recall our week 2 theme about walking for community connectedness and how important it is for our mental health to have good connections in our neighbourhoods.
Help the environment: When you shop locally, you reduce your carbon footprint and help to cut down on pollution. Local businesses often source their products from local manufacturers and growers. This helps to reduce long distance logistics, fossil fuel usage, and even helps to ensure local farms and agriculture thrive. If you’re buying locally produced food, chances are it’s also going to be fresher and tastier!
Like Small Business BC explains, there are many great reasons why we should shop locally, from community building to reducing our carbon footprint. As we’ve talked about in our previous weekly themes, walking to strengthen our neighbourly connections and walking for the environment are super important - so let’s walk when we shop locally!
Most people walk for leisure and exercise (which is fantastic!) but opt to drive when running errands and shopping. It is understandable that using a car is sometimes convenient if you’re picking up large items or going on a big shopping spree and need to bring a lot of things home, but there are ways to reduce or stop driving for errands, or make more environmentally-friendly choices when going shopping!
Shop locally to drive less and take shorter trips by car
Driving for errands allows you travel farther away from home, increasing your carbon footprint and causing you to shop locally less. If you must drive to pick up a large amount of goods, consider shopping closer to home to reduce the distance you need to drive. Some ways you can reduce your carbon footprint if you need to use a car are switching to an electric vehicle, using car-sharing services, or carpooling with friends and family. Organize a “shopping day” with your friends and family where you all get your larger purchases done together and take only one vehicle, rather than everyone going separately with their own cars.
Walk when you don’t have to purchase a lot of things
If you know you don’t have to make a large purchase and can easily carry your goods home, or are running errands that don’t require you to bring anything home (such as attending a salon appointment, a routine visit to the dentist, or going to a coffee shop or restaurant), consider walking there! If you walk for errands, you will be motivated to shop locally, use more small businesses, and get some exercise and fresh air while you’re at it.
Go multi-modal
Multi-modal transportation means you get around with different transportation modes. If it’s too far for you to walk somewhere and you usually reach for the car keys to save yourself time or energy - consider taking transit or cycling half the way! You can walk to your nearest bus stop or SkyTrain station, take transit as close to your destination as you please, and walk the rest of the way. You can do the same with your bike or electric scooter! TransLink has excellent safe bike parking facilities at select transit stations you can use to park your bike while you walk for the rest of your journey or complete your errands.
The bottom line
Shopping locally is great for the community and environment, and so is walking! If we simply reduce some of our errands-related journeys by car and opt to walk, cycle, or transit to our destinations (or use a combination of transportation modes!) we can make a huge difference in how we treat the earth, our neighbourhoods, and our health.
This week, we encourage you to walk to get your errands done and choose local businesses for your shopping and dining needs. If you’re travelling farther than you can to walk the whole way, consider using multi-modal transportation and take transit, a bike, a scooter, or carpool a portion of the way. Any small effort can make a huge difference and can positively impact our habits and relationships with our communities in the long-term.
Let us know on Twitter or Instagram how you plan to walk to get your errands done this week and what your favourite local businesses are!
