More than New Year’s, September seems a good time to embark on resolutions. Change is in the air as summer eases on to fall. Everybody starts to get serious about the new school year and a renewed intensity on the job. Really, they should hold New Year’s Eve celebrations on Labour Day.

This new school year, I’ve resolved to use the automobile less. The first step to this goal (pun intended) is to walk more, starting by walking my eldest daughter to school. This is an easy exercise, and it gives me time with my daughter as we scoot along the sidewalk with other parents and kids. More than that, it’s another way I can get healthier.

For years I’ve tried to get more active, if only because I want to be around while my daughters experience those later firsts, including going off to college, getting married and having kids. To that end, I’ve invested in a pedometer, to see how many steps I take over the course of a day. I’ve heard it said that an active individual walks at least 10,000 steps a day. I’ve found it difficult to get up to half that number… until I started walking my daughter to school.

I’ve also been helped by Grand River Transit’s service improvements, which launched earlier this month. Now that my youngest is attending pre-school some distance from our house, we’ve benefitted from a new bus that provides a direct connection between home and school, without requiring a transfer through the Charles Street Terminal. Again, this is more time spent with my daughter — time that isn’t nearly so interactive when she’s strapped into her booster seat in my car.

Over the past year, as the region has debated whether to build an LRT and improve public transit, the refrain of the naysayers is that such improvements are wasted money. Transit, they say, is not and can never be convenient enough to entice people out of their cars. Well, I’m here to say that they’re wrong about that, and I doubt that I’m alone.

Yes, it takes longer to get around on public transit than it would if I hopped into the car in my driveway, but the situation is improving, and transit has other advantages. Using it is better for my health, better for the air my kids breathe and, increasingly, better for my pocketbook.

Earlier this week, it cost me $50 to fill up the tank of my moderately fuel-efficient vehicle. It was only a couple of years ago when the price of gasoline passed a dollar a litre with much media hullaballo. Today, we drive up to filling stations advertising gas at $1.30.

The fact is gas prices are never going to come down below a dollar. The high prices aren’t the result of taxes, or oil company gouging; it just costs that amount to pull oil out of the ground these days and to refine it into products we use. There are huge reserves of oil in the Alberta tarsands, but we can only profitably extract that if oil prices remain above $50 a barrel. For those of us who depend on our cars to get around, we’re just going to have to accept that we’ll be paying twice what we used to for fuel.

Or we can look at alternatives. We can walk more. We can carpool or take transit. For me, it hasn’t been nearly as hard as I feared. And, ironically, if more of us do this, there’ll be more space on the roads, and cheaper gasoline, for those who have no choice but to drive.

And you’ll feel better. You’ll be fitter, happier, and richer, both in terms of money, and time with your kids. It all starts with walking your kids to school.

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James Bow is a writer and a father of two in Kitchener.
You can read more about him http://bowjamesbow.ca/