TORONTO – Comedian Steven Wright once joked that everything is within walking distance – if you have the time.
For one sociology professor, the time ended up being four years. That’s how long City College of New York Professor William Helmreich says it took him to walk down every street in every borough in New York City – all 9733 kilometres of it.
“I said to myself, ‘how do you climb a mountain?’ As they say, one step at a time; I’ll walk the city one block at a time,” Helmreich told CBS News in New York.
Helmreich estimates he’s walked over 120,000 blocks in total through all five of the Big Apple’s iconic boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, The Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island.
He says the idea for the project came from a game he and his father used to play called “Last Stop”, in which they would ride a subway to the end of the line, then explore whatever neighbourhood they arrived in.
He documented his extraordinarily long walk in his 2013 book The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City.
“I do it because I love the city,” Helmreich said. “It’s fascinating to me. It’s the worlds greatest outdoor museum.”
“Every day I learned something new. Every day I saw something I didn’t know existed.”
That got us thinking: just how far would you have to walk to cover every block in four of Canada’s most iconic cities?
For the sake of balance, we chose an even sampling of municipalities moving east to west. Let’s assume for our “test” an average walking pace of four kilometres an hour, and that you treat your walking like a full-time job, spending eight hours a day pounding the pavement.
Halifax
Just how long would it take to walk down every boulevard of the the city of the Citadel?
According to the city’s communications department, there are 1845 kilometres of roads in the city of Halifax.
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We say “mere” because while that’s understandably smaller than, say, a larger city like Toronto or New York, it’s still slightly more than the total driving distance from Halifax to Toronto: about 1794 kilometres.
It also means you could walk down every road – past Pier 21, the HMS Sackville, and the Maritime Mall – in a “mere” 57 and a half days.
Toronto
It’s hard to get an accurate idea of how many streets, roads, paths, trails and other walkways there are in Canada’s largest city.
However, according to the city manager’s office there are 7945 kilometres of sidewalks alone in the Big Smoke – so let’s assume you planned to walk down each and every last one.
You’d complete your expedition in a little under 249 days – so no dice on missing out on those lake effect snowstorms.
As a fun bonus fact, this means you could do over 70 laps of walking down each and every sidewalk in the city of Toronto in the time since the Maple Leafs last won a Stanley Cup.
Calgary
We know horseback or pickup truck is the preferred method of transportation in Calgary (or, y’know, any other form of transit common in a major city) but let’s see how long it would take to walk it.
According to the city of Calgary communications department, there are 5,848 kilometres of roads in Calgary.
For starters, that’s almost enough to get you from one end of Canada to the other, a distance of a little over 7000 kilometres.
It also means you’d be walking for 183 days – assuming you didn’t stop to take in the Calgary Stampede.
Vancouver
Finally, we arrive on Canada’s west coast, and for the first time we’re not dealing with epic amounts of snow during our long walk (hope you like a little rain though).
According to the City of Vancouver, there are 1420 kilometres of streets in the city, plus another 650 kilometres of drivable laneways. So we’ll call it 2017 kilometres total.
That means you’d be finished your walking tour of Vancouver in about 65 days, more than enough time to enjoy the summer weather in one of Canada’s most temperate climates.
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