Rows of cars whiz past me. The speed limit is 80 km/h, but it’s cloudy and dry—the perfect conditions for speeding—and I frequently wonder if I’m going to get hit by a car. My knee hurts, but that’s just what my knee is like.

If I were on the other side of the road, I would have my own walkway separated by bushes and height. But in the last three hours that I’ve been walking, I’ve discovered how rarely I’m afforded the option to cross the road. Everywhere that I want to go is on this side of the road, where I have no coverage and not even the comfort of facing traffic.

The 1.7 km length of Bowen Road that spans between East Wellington and Northfield has a total of four crosswalks. No wonder I always see people jaywalking.

Technically speaking, it only takes a little under three hours to walk from Downtown Nanaimo to Woodgrove. It’s not an impossible task, but people hike mountains and canyons. Whether or not a feat is possible says nothing of whether or not it’s practical.

“Walkability” is generally understood to be the ease with which one can walk from place to place. Ease refers to the length, but also the comfortability. Walk Score calls Nanaimo a “Walker’s Paradise” with a whopping 96 out of 100, declaring that daily errands do not require a car.

Simultaneously, Walk Score (yes, the same one) has graded Nanaimo with a 35 out of 100, calling it a “Car-Dependent City.”

Cynthia deConinckSmith, a fourth-year Bachelor of Arts student at VIU, has been a pedestrian in Nanaimo since 2021. When I ask them what their opinion is on Nanaimo’s walkability, they respond, “Oh, there is no walkability.”

In our conversation, they mention a few factors that would put a damper on the pedestrian’s experience. Like whether transit, shops, and other necessities are within reasonable distance of each other, or if the infrastructure is comfortable to walk through. Are there trees to protect you from the sun? Or a sidewalk to put distance between yourself and the busy streets?

“Concrete is the worst possible thing for your foot,” they add.

As far as what Nanaimo can do to become more walkable in the future, deConinckSmith suggests more specialized bus routes in populous areas and more buses along pre-existing routes. “Especially as we move towards an economy where having your own car is becoming less and less affordable,” deConinckSmith says.

They also suggest planting more trees along sidewalks to provide cover to pedestrians. That is an endeavour that will take some time before we see the benefits, but, as they put it, “You’re still paving the way for it to be walkable in the future.”

~

The original plan was to wake up at eight in the morning, take a bus downtown, and walk to the other end of the city before noon.

Admittedly, I woke up late. Admittedly, I spent the next hour eating breakfast and playing on my phone. So, when I finally checked the bus schedules at 10:48 am, it was my own fault that the next bus wouldn’t arrive for another hour. I live in the middle of Nanaimo. Walking from halfway-through-Nanaimo to Woodgrove is a slightly less exciting title, so I took a taxi.

Officially, my walk starts at the Downtown Bus Exchange, right across from Port Place Mall.

It’s 11:19 am, sunny, and cold enough to make my nose run, but not enough to shiver. An older gentleman sits on a parking block, watching with amusement as I snap a picture of the road. The sidewalks and bike lanes are thick, I’m shaded by autumn trees, and the ocean is inches away. This is the kind of fresh air that supposedly betters your mental health.

If the last 15 minutes were my only impression of Nanaimo, I might come away saying crazy things like, “This is great!” and “I see no problems here.”

“That’s been designed for people to come and walk it,” Francesca Pacchiano, Managing Editor of Gooey and former member of The Navigator, says of the stretch between the Port of Nanaimo and the Old City Quarter. When she moved to Nanaimo three years ago, she had a car. It broke down almost immediately, leaving her to the mercy of the transit system or the peril of walking beside the highway.

My feet, as they often do, are bound to hurt once I finish the day. When I was leaving the house, I had no desire to add shoulder or back pain into the mix. The tote bag on my arm is nearly empty. It houses my journal, my wallet, and a phone charger. I’m carrying my Canon T5i in its own camera bag.

“I would make choices,” she explains. An armful of protein and vegetables, or a jug of milk? A full load of groceries, or toilet paper? “I just couldn’t carry it.”

The path itself is plain sailing. Front Street turns into Comox Road, which is where I turn onto Terminal Avenue—there’s no chance of me accidentally walking in circles, which is sort of a blessing. Here, there’s still an effort being made for pedestrians. I’m technically on the highway, but there are sidewalks and shops on either side. There are no more murals or flowerbeds like in Nanaimo’s central Downtown area, but there’s still a designated place for me to walk.

I turn left onto Townsite Road, which will eventually meet Bowen Road. I’m in a residential area, so the sidewalk on my side has disappeared. The sidewalk on the other side is more like a haphazard raised spillage, but it’s a sidewalk all the same.

As I near Ecole Quarterway Elementary School, I spot a young girl walking a stumpy black blob that, when I squint, I realize is a pug. I’ve crossed the road to walk on the sidewalk, and I wonder why she and her dog are walking on the side without one. There are warning signs for the winding road, but not really any space for a pedestrian. I continue onwards, and realize why—if she waited for the next crosswalk, she would have to double back to make her turn off. Not having enough crosswalks, as you may notice, is a running theme in Nanaimo’s infrastructure.

“Bowen Road is terrifying,” Tara Wohlleben, who graduated earlier this year from VIU with a major in Creative Writing and a minor in English, says, laughing a little, but they’re very serious. “I will not bike down it.”

Wohlleben—a hike lover from Gabriola Island with no interest in getting a car—has walked the length of Nanaimo more than once. To them, it’s not even significant enough to sit down and write a whole article about it afterwards.

The upside of being on Bowen is that I finally get to throw out the empty coffee cup that I’ve been carrying in my bag since I left the Old City Quarter, unable to find a garbage can accessible by the public alongside the highway or in a residential neighbourhood.

The E&N Trail extends over eight kilometres and travels alongside Nanaimo’s railroad tracks. Knowing that opportunities to cross the road are slim, I stick to the side where I will be able to access Country Club Mall and Nanaimo North Town Center…. But I continue to look longingly at the lovely trail I’ve avoided.

I reach a dirt path. It’s not idyllic like the ones I’d pictured when Wohlleben called for less concrete. There are coffee cups so faded that I’m not sure where they are originally from, and garbage that I’m too afraid to guess what it is. The path is too skinny for two people to walk side by side, and barely big enough for me myself, but at least I have a meridian between myself and traffic for a moment.

At Nanaimo North Town Centre, I headed in to rest my feet at Tim Horton’s. I’ve always been confused about how to enter this mall if you aren’t entering from Upland Drive. It takes 15 minutes to follow the designated path from the Island Highway.

“It’s not like it’s a difficult walk,” Aneisa Corfield explains, speaking to Nanaimo as a whole. “But it’s surrounded by … car dealerships. You’ve got parking lots with the malls. It’s just unpleasant.”

Corfield, a fourth-year Biology major at VIU, recently returned from a six-month exchange to England. For the first time in her life, she did not have access to a car. What shocked her was that she didn’t need one. Everything was within a half-hour walking distance, if not less.

Here, in Nanaimo, even the same length can be miserable. There’s Mitsubishi, then Nissan, then Chrysler, then Porsche. Each even more fascinating than the last.

On biking, Corfield reiterates some of the same sentiments I heard from Wohlleben. There are plenty of nice bike paths, but they end without warning or clear direction on where to go next.

“As soon as I’m leaving the few designated paths that I know work well … It does get more dangerous,” Corfield says.

The same is true for walking. Even sidewalks end abruptly; there are beautiful crosswalks, newly painted and paved with buttons and brightly flashing lights, which abruptly disappear.

Unfortunately, I didn’t quite make it to Woodgrove. My journey ended approximately 10 minutes away. I had a choice—either I commit to journalism, complete the planned journey, and then wait an hour for a bus to come so I can then walk a half hour home (all in all, the same amount of time it would take to walk the whole way), *or* I could catch the bus coming right around the corner.

I opted to end my trek at Superstore at 4:25 pm. For full transparency, I got sidetracked on Bowen by running into a friend, so I was stationary for about an hour.

 It wasn’t quite the “before noon” journey that I had originally planned.

Parking lots might be categorized as city blocks, and numbers go up or down depending on the amount of amenities spread throughout the city. ‘Amenities’ could refer to a public park, or it could refer to a liquor store. Walk Score is an automated efficiency model. It’s not a real person walking down every street.

I’ve only had three addresses in Nanaimo. My shortest journey to a grocery store has been a 15-minute walk. To get to my workplace in North Nanaimo, all three addresses have resulted in an average commuting time of an hour. To get to VIU from my current address, my commuting time is 50 minutes, or a 96-minute walk.

If you ask me, I would be more likely to agree with the 35 out of 100 Walk Score.

So, Nanaimo is walkable if you have an extra hour or two to journey as a pedestrian on highways, or wait another four blocks before you’re able to cross the road, or if car dealerships are your favourite scenery. Nanaimo is walkable if you’re willing or if you have no other choice. I wouldn’t dare call it a “Walker’s Paradise,” but Nanaimo is walkable.

But why would you do any of that?