This thing popped up on my yahoo front page:
It was the headline “This Ford GT Has Fewer Than You Walk In A Day” that
really caught my attention, obviously. And as you read the article you discover
that the car has 2.7 miles on the clock, and is coming up for auction, expected
to sell for about half a million dollars.
And I began wondering first of all who the “you” in that headline is
referring to, and then I wondered just how many miles does the average person
people walk in a day. I accept that
average is a fairly nebulous term here, but still …
My less than exhaustive research suggests that nobody really knows, although
there have been plenty of studies that have come up with various contestable answers,
many of them involving experiments that involve giving people pedometers.
Now this strikes me as a, let’s say, flawed methodology. If you give somebody a pedometer and tell
them you’re going to measure how far they walk, you can be sure that people are
obviously going to aim for the big numbers and walk a lot more than they usually
do. So … using the (I would say
inflated) results, a 2010 study by David R Bassett of the University of Tennessee,
concluded that the average American walks 5,117 steps a day.
Of course steps come in various sizes – if they averaged 3 feet each
that would 5117 yards or 2.9 miles – thereby in fact proving that yahoo headline
to be perfectly true. However, I’m
guessing that when you’re shuffling around the kitchen or the office these
steps are considerably shorter. Similar
studies show that the Americans are way behind western
Australia (9,695 steps), Switzerland (9,650 steps) and Japan (7,168 steps) per
day.
And as
for the British, well again, the information is patchy but a 2011 article in
the Daily Mail contained such gems as “Britons
typically walk an average of two miles a day,” “one in six say they need to put
their feet up when they return back at their desk or get home,” “the average
Briton becomes exhausted after only walking up the stairs.”
Again the notion of an average Briton is pretty meaningles, but I find
all this extremely plausible. For what
it’s worth, my own observations, unscientific though they are, do suggest that the British
probably do walk more than their American counterparts, even given huge
variations in and between both groups.
Now, a lot of people assume that because I like walking I must hate cars. This is not actually true,
and is possibly a secret shame. Of
course I don’t have half a million dollars burning a hole in my pocket, but if
I did who’s to say I wouldn’t blow it on a ridiculous supercar? However, I’m pretty sure that in no circumstances
would I buy a nine-year-old car with just 2.7 miles on the clock. In order to stay healthy, cars need
exercising just like people.
