"Everyone drives, it's how things are here"

Some of the default isn't yours. It's the place's. The road outside the school is a queue because everyone queues. The lift lobby is full because everyone rides. To walk is to be the only one, and being the only one is tiring in a way that has nothing to do with legs.

The figures bear you out, to a point. In 2024, cars accounted for fifty-nine per cent of all trips in England and seventy-six per cent of all the miles. Driving is how things are done. But the same survey found that people made two hundred and sixty-seven walking trips each on average that year, and walked further than in any year since the survey began in 2002, and that "just walk" was the third commonest reason for any trip at all. So everyone drives, and everyone also walks, and the second number is rising while the first is flat. You'd be joining something, not leaving it.

There's another figure in the survey that I find more interesting. In 2023, when people were asked what would encourage them to walk more, the commonest answer, from half of them, was nothing. Not better pavements, not safer roads. Nothing. I'd read that as the default speaking. It's not a considered position. It's what a person says when they've never had a reason to consider the question, and the car is on the drive, and the question sounds like a criticism. If you'd been asked that question a month ago, you might have said nothing too, and here you are with a list of thirty trips.

What you can't change is the road outside the school. What you can change is the default in your own house, and a house's default is contagious in both directions. The next chapter but two is about that. For now I'd only say that "everyone drives" is a description of the car park and not an instruction, and that the person who walks to the school gate isn't the odd one out. They're the one who isn't in the queue.