Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want to minimize the long distance walks add an exponential weight for distance then solve. There are many ways to go about this stuff, but the goal is to map your preferences to the weight function.
Right, but then the problem is no longer linear and approximating is more difficult. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "exponential weight" in a linear program, do you have an example?
You might make your weight function as w(d, p) = d * (2 ^ p)