That was a very nice story Tuesday about one of my favorite cities in the world, Baguio.

Bucking high fuel prices and determined to make cars and other motor vehicles disappear from its streets, city officials walked to Burnham Park last Monday to launch their ?Walk, Baguio, Walk? campaign. The various departments brought their mascots along and several participants carried placards that said: ?I am sexy. I walk to work.? The campaign envisions a coding system that would limit motor vehicles in city streets to once a week. That would apply in particular to Session Road, the heart of Baguio, whose arteries are currently clogged by an abundance of cars and taxis.

It?s an inspired idea, and one the rest of the country ought to emulate?at least in spirit, if not in letter. I say in spirit because there is one thing Baguio has that most other places in this country do not, and which indeed it has in common with the temperate countries of the world?a cool weather. Or during some months of the year, a cold one. That makes walking infinitely more tolerable, if not pleasurable. I noted that our report described the weather in Baguio last Monday as ?bracing,? as ideal a condition for walking as you can find.

While at this, I don?t know why the eating places in Session Road shouldn?t support the campaign vigorously. It would not only allow that road to breathe and maybe even regain some of its pristine glory, it would improve the patronage of those eating places. Bracing weather and long walks have been known to work up appetites.

Weirdly enough, as I?ve written about on the occasions that I?ve gone abroad, the rich countries have a culture of walking while we, a horrendously impoverished one, do not. The most walking I?ve done is in those countries, at a pace most of us can only find grueling. The walks aren?t just long, they are fast. Or haven?t you noticed the way people walk in New York, London, Paris and Berlin? It?s as if the devil were at their backs, which it probably is. Everyone?s rushing to get to the subway or underground or metro to catch a train or to get to an appointment on time. Well, they?ve also got a culture of punctuality, but that?s another story altogether. Even when they?re not rushing to catch a train or appointment, they?re still rushing. Habits are not easy to break.

You ride only when you have to go long distances, you walk when you need to traverse short ones. And their definition of ?short? is not unlike that of our rural folk for whom ?d?yan lang? [just there] could mean several adjoining fields. In Metro Manila, you ride buses and jeepneys when you need to go long distances and take the tricycle to and from the local church or bus stop. It?s a recipe for heart disease.

But like I said, the weather has something to do with it. It?s not always easy walking in the heat or rain, which is pretty much all the weather we have. Nor is it the healthiest thing doing so while buses and jeepneys are spewing black smoke in your face as they rev up or as they idle fretfully in traffic, quite apart from threatening to sideswipe you in the sidewalk-less sides of the road. Not quite incidentally, the black smoke has been true of Baguio too over the last decade or so, some jeepneys leaving a trail of soot as they climb up the steeper roads.

None of these is irremediable, however, or offers any real excuse for not walking. You can?t do anything about the weather, but you can do something about the bedlam in the streets. If you can fence off pedestrians from the streets, which Metropolitan Manila Development Authority Chairman Bayani Fernando insists on doing, you can provide covered walks for them. It costs less, and pays more dividends. You?ve got covered walks, you?ve got no reason not to walk to and from the Metro Rail Transit stations the way folks of richer countries do.

There?s no choice in any case. And not just about walking but about changing our lifestyle to cope with harsh times. I recall that many years ago, the martial law government launched a campaign against profligacy in light of dire times, which was when oil prices were going up and the foreign banks, from which that government borrowed billions of pesos, had begun to claim their due. It even had a cartoon character to give it a face, who was Asyong Aksaya, the epitome of wastefulness. When that campaign was launched, the dire times could still be interpreted as a temporary condition, a cyclical downturn that could be expected to change later on. That isn?t so today. The prospect isn?t just that fuel prices will soar to astronomical heights, it is that fuel itself will increasingly be hard to come by. Not to speak of rice and clement weather.

The anti-profligacy campaign didn?t work, no small thanks to Ferdinand Marcos being seen as the most profligate Asyong of all, given the wanton destruction he wrought upon the country with his pillage. As is Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, which makes her the least qualified to prosecute such a campaign. But prosecute it we must, in spite of her. We have no choice. It?s not just that things will get worse before they get better, it?s that things will never get better?if by better we mean being able to go back to the luxury of hopping into cars on a whim to get around.

The Baguio experiment isn?t just a good call to try a completely healthy alternative to driving or riding motor vehicles, it is a good call to reexamine on a broader plane our insupportable lifestyle, and look for alternatives. Private cars have to give way to public transport, and less efficient ways of public transport, like buses and jeepneys, have to give way to more efficient ones, like trains and trams. I leave the bicyclists to plug for their cause. None of this is easy, of course.

But, well, necessity isn?t just the mother of invention, it is also the father of determination.