One of the things that we complain about as students of UCA is that the parking is crappy here. I feel as if that could not be more wrong. Students should walk everywhere on campus. The benefits of walking are too good to pass up.
Until I became a college student the only time I walked was to a deer stand and around in a mall. The problem is that’s just how it is in the south; we just don’t ever walk. We complain any time we don’t park by the front door. Walking is not a part of the culture here. We tend to spend time searching for the perfect parking spot, even if we are just going to walk around when we reach our destination.
The distance we travel on campus is not great. According to google maps, the road surrounding the entire campus is 2.7 miles long. the campus is a large rectangle and the longest part it is about a mile long and the shortest is less than half a mile.
Google maps estimated that it would take the average person less than 23 minutes to cross the entire campus, diagonally Most of the classes were within a half mile radius, and in the most extreme case .8 miles from Lewis Science to Stanley Russ Hall. Surely we can walk two miles a day.
There are many times when I don’t feel like being outside in Arkansas’ ridiculous weather but for the most part I don’t need to park closely. I just want to because I’m just lazy like that. An example of our laziness is driving to the fitness center, which does not make a lot of sense unless it is cold outside or time is a major issue. If it is, there is always metered parking.
Walking at 2.5 mph for 2 miles, on average burns about 125 calories for a 115-pound person,180 for a 165-pound person and 218 for a 200-pound person. Assuming a student had to only walk 2 miles total in a day, 5 days a week and they weighed between 115 and 200 pounds they could burn anywhere from 900 to 2,590 calories on campus in a week. Considering it takes about 3,500 calories to burn a pound weekly, over a year a college student can burn from 27,900 to 82,900 just walking on campus.
When people from other places visit UCA, one of the most frequent compliments is on the natural beauty of the campus. The campus is laid out in a way that allows for the natural elements like grass and trees to be a part of the landscape. Having natural elements like grass and trees are a privilege that not all colleges have and should therefore be considered when thinking about the added distance between areas.
Walking is just a part of life we are going to have to deal with. How much walking we want to do varies from person to person but it’s something we all should embrace. We don’t need to fix any parking situation by building more lots and raising tuition more. We just need to accept the 25 minutes we spend walking dail
Walking to class important part of staying healthy in college
