Everyday
What if I walked instead of drove?
What is the estimated time and money difference if a repeated short trip is walked rather than driven?
Most trips in England are local. In the National Travel Survey, people make around eighteen trips a week, and a large share of those are short enough that walking is physically possible even if it is not the habit. This page compares the estimated difference between driving a repeated journey and walking it: a simplified fuel-and-wear cost per kilometre on one side, extra minutes on the other. It does not score health, air quality or carbon, and it does not claim walking is the better choice. Weather, hills, children, shopping bags and safe pavements sit outside the arithmetic unless you fold them into the speeds or the cost. Change the distance and the weekly rhythm; the interesting result is usually the time–money pair, not a ranking.
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Results update as you move the controls.
A local hop, not a motorway trip.
Count each one-way trip.
Simplified fuel and wear, not full ownership.
Urban averages are much lower than the speed limit.
Your result
£144
estimated amount not spent
Compared with driving the same trips, using your cost per km.
- Walking distance
- 960 km
- Extra time walking
- 154 hours
- Journeys switched
- 480
- Time if you drove
- 38 hours
About 596.5 miles over 48 weeks.
153.6 hours in total; 19 minutes more per journey.
10 one-way trips a week.
What does that mean?
Compared with driving, walking those 480 journeys is estimated as lower spend of £144 on fuel and wear, and about 154 hours more travel time. That is a comparison of the estimated difference, not a verdict on the better routine.
At a glance
- Walk time (hours)192 hours
- Drive time (hours)38 hours
Compare
| Walk time each way | 24 min |
|---|---|
| Drive time each way | 5 min |
| Estimated driving cost avoided | £144 |
Compare scenarios
Short trips are where the habit lives
Energy Saving Trust notes that a large majority of UK journeys are under five miles. Those are the trips where a car is often used as a default rather than because the distance demands it. This model treats one journey length and a weekly count — a school run, a station hop, a lunchtime shop — and multiplies them across the weeks you enter. It is a repeated-routine calculator, not a map of your whole week.
Time is the other axis
Walking is slower than even a congested urban drive once you include the whole door-to-door walk. A default 5 km/h pace is a brisk but ordinary walk; urban driving at 25 km/h already folds in lights and parking searches better than a free-flow speed limit would. The extra hours are the cost of the swap. Whether those hours feel wasted, pleasant, or usable as thinking time is not something a slider can decide.
What the cost per kilometre is doing
The default £0.15 per km is a simplified stand-in for fuel plus a little wear — closer to an energy cost than to HMRC’s full mileage allowance, which also covers standing costs. Insurance, tax, parking and depreciation barely move if you drop a two-kilometre trip. If you want a fuller motoring cost, raise the rate, or use the experiment that stops using the car altogether.
How we calculated this
Journeys = journeys per week × weeks. Walking distance = journeys × one-way distance. Driving cost avoided = distance × cost per km (walking is treated as zero money cost). Walking time = distance ÷ walking speed; driving time = distance ÷ driving speed; extra time = walking time − driving time. Speeds are average door-to-door figures, not peak or hill-adjusted. No calorie, fitness or emissions model is applied. This experiment provides estimates for educational purposes and is not financial advice. Actual results vary depending on rates, fees, taxes, inflation and individual circumstances.
Go further
A curated rabbit hole from this question. Each link is a real experiment, not a random suggestion.
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