Driving hard
[ . . . ] most travel should be regarded as being in the same economic category as working and if, as the stats linked above imply, Americans spend about twice as much time travelling as Australians, then reducing travel times to the Australian level would be equivalent to a productivity improvement of between 12 and 15 per cent. As it happens, combined with the relatively small difference in hours of paid work, adjusting for hours of work and travel would just about eliminate the gap between Australian and US GDP per capita (about 20 per cent on standard PPP estimates).
An interesting notion, as is the earlier post it references.
By not walking to our shopping (I do this for all but the large weekly run) or school or workplaces, we perpetuate the myth of unsafe streets, since empty public spaces are seen as dangerous or risky. If my kids attended my local school, instead of one a few miles away, we would walk there. In fact, we briefly considered moving to make that a possibility . . .