It’s 3 Miles From Times Square to Soho

The lights of Times Square

When you’re in New York, you tend to walk a lot. You walk to the store, to the subway, to the bus stop, to get a bagel, to have a drink. You just walk.

As someone from California, where we own A LOT of cars, this can come as a surprise. “You walk? Like you walk … places?”

I got used to this on my recent trip. When I’d check the number of daily steps recorded by my Apple Watch, I found I was routinely in the range of 15,000 to 18,000 steps per day. Now granted, these were vacation days. I wasn’t working, butt in a chair, for eight hours a day. My butt was moving places.

Thanks to all this walking, I have now re-calibrated my sense of what is walkable and what’s not.

For example, one day I was up in Times Square, which is in midtown, at about 42nd Street. I had to get home, which is right around 2nd Street in Soho.

New York City street in winter.

So, quick math, that’s forty blocks. Forty. Would you walk that far? That day, I decided I would. Sure, I could’ve taken the subway. But I was on vacation, so I decided to walk. It was around 4pm, and kind of drizzly. But I walked.

My watch measured everything for me. The trip was 2.81 miles and took me just over an hour. I’m not sure how many steps that was. But that day, I walked 18,838 steps, or about 9.37 miles. I’m sure that 3 mile walk had a big part of that total.

So the bottom line for me is that I now know that I can walk 40 blocks. In the past, I wouldn’t considered that improbable. Not now.

One final observation. Now that I’m back home, would I consider walking three miles somewhere here? Are you crazy? No! I’d take the car.