SEATTLE - Taking a stroll around the neighborhood and checking out the scenery is all in a day's work for Chad Lynch.
"When you are tasked with it, you can say it's part of my job, I have to examine this route," said Lynch.
Lynch is the cartographer (map maker) behind 'Seattle Walking Maps'.
"Three good old fashioned, paper maps," he explained.
The maps feature routes you can navigate by foot in north, central, and south Seattle.
"To me, I think of it more as an adventure map, somewhere to go out exploring and there are so many different places you can go," Lynch said.
Lynch works for the Seattle Department Of Transportation. Most of his time is spent in the office collecting data from a variety of sources. But, then, there are those days research calls.
"We even identify places if you want to go watch a movie, we show movie theaters to figure out how to walk from your house to the movie theater," Lynch said.
Instead of noting mileage, the maps are marked with the average amount of minutes it takes to walk from point A to B.
Lynch explained,"If you wanted, for instance, to have a 20 minute walk, you could find where you want to start and go along a path and reach 20 or reach 10 and you wanted to loop back."
For Lynch, it's all part of the job, getting people out and about pointed in the right direction.
"It's to let them understand it's not necessarily difficult to walk. You can walk a short amount of time and it's great exercise," he said.
The three map are available at most libraries. Or, you can click here.
