Columnist Susan Snyder: Numbers meant to move us

Friday, Sept. 6, 2002 | 5:43 a.m.

Take 200 people who want to travel somewhere in their city.

They can use 180 cars.

Or five buses.

Or one light-rail train.

Or 200 pairs of walking shoes.

In the Las Vegas Valley, as in other cities, our quality of life is a numbers game.

The number of bad-air days.

The number of people who die in car crashes.

The number of choices we make, good or bad.

"I want you to remember 30, 25 and 200,000," Mark Fenton, host of Public Broadcasting Services' "America's Walking" television show, said Wednesday at a national conference on walking and bicycling. The meeting was conducted in St. Paul, Minn.

Physicians recommend that we get 30 minutes of exercise three times each week, but only 25 percent of us are doing that, and 200,000 people die of inactivity-related illnesses every year, Fenton said.

Locally our numbers show we aren't exactly setting an example for changing our figures.

Numbers from the 2000 U.S. Census show 89 percent of Clark County residents drove to work in a private motorized vehicle, and 75 percent of them drove alone.

Only 1.8 percent of us commuted in a carpool of three people. Less than 1 percent of carpools had four people or more.

Another 4 percent of us rode the bus to work, 2.3 percent of us walked and 0.5 percent of us rode a bicycle.

How long did it take us? Census figures show a fifth of the 631,236 Clark County workers ages 16 and older spent 20 to 24 minutes traveling to our jobs, while 29 percent commuted for 30 to 89 minutes daily. And 2.2 percent of us traveled 90 minutes or more.

Numbers show that we travel too long, too often alone and move around too little.

This is our quantity of life.

Where is the measure of quality?

Can we see it in the numbers of us who die on roadways or in the figures that illustrate the rat-race pace of our commutes and our acceptance of certain levels of speeding, impairment and inattention behind the wheel?

Numbers from Nevada's Office of Traffic Safety show we had 43 traffic deaths statewide in August -- a monthly record for the Silver State.

One was Sandy Thompson, Las Vegas Sun vice president and associate editor who died Aug. 9. An SUV rammed her car from behind as she was stopped at a traffic light on County Road 215 and Far Hills Avenue in Summerlin.

Numbers released this week show the driver who hit her had seven times the legal limit of THC -- marijuana's active ingredient -- in his system when he plowed into Thompson's car.

Clark County court officials say he was returning from taking his mother to work and traveling at least 20 mph over the speed limit. He has been popped for speeding three other times, they said.

Ugly numbers. What will it take to change them? How many aggravating commutes, speeding tickets and deaths will we tolerate? What choices are we willing to make?

It takes 2,000 steps to travel a mile, but every mile starts with one.

So does every revolution.

One is a powerful number.

One less car, once a week. One choice, by one person.

Which of one us will make it?