Where you live
29 July, 2008
An article in the Salt Lake Tribune caught my eye this morning. It talks about a study that uses drivers license data to determine correlations between where you live and how much you weigh. They take your height and your weight to get your body mass index, and then they figure out where you live, and then they used census data to figure out how walkable your neighborhood is. It seems that if you live in a home in a walkable neighborhood, you are more likely to weigh less than someone you lives in a car dominated neighborhood. It is an interesting study on a subject that needs to be thought about by city planners and politicians alike. The results seem to me to be common sense. If you are comfortable walking or bicycling, you will weigh less than if you don’t. If you have a destination such as a park or shopping, you are more likely to get out and walk or bike. We have gotten away from common sense and broad views in our planing and our way of thinking in this area. With any luck, high gas prices will force a shift away from sprawl and towards more walkable and bicycle friendly communities. (If you want to talk to someone who has done some real research on this, chat with our friend over at Sans Auto. He is finishing up his Doctoral studies in this very subject.)
29 July, 2008 at 7:43 am
My wife saw this same study highlighted on the 10 ‘o clock news last night. Very cool! A walkable/bikeable neighborhood is on a short list of “must haves” for the first house we buy.
Does anyone know of walkable neighborhoods in Utah?
30 July, 2008 at 12:32 pm
It’s a really weird subject. There is a lot of correlational data that shows that people who live in walkable areas walk more and are healthier. What a correlational study can’t show is whether people walk more because they are in a walkable community or whether people move to walkable communities because they like to walk.
Of course walkable communities are good because they give everyone at least an opportunity to walk, but there are some weird data out there. I talked to a lady who recently tried to do an intervention study where she added infrastructure to an area to make it more walkable. She found that people walked LESS after the infrastructure was added. I’ve seen more than one study with similar conclusions and it really seems backwards. They are still trying to figure out why. I still dont see it as a good reason not to include infrastructure to make an area walkable, but maybe infrastructure isn’t what needs to change in order to make a place walkable. MAybe it’s drivers’ behavior. maybe it’s law enforcement (that I feel is lacking here). Lots of questions, not a lot of answers.
30 July, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Those are some very interesting findings. I do believe that in the long term we will find that if we make our communities more walkable we will see more people walking. Just as it happened when we made streets and communities more focused on the automobile. The same goes for any transportation mode. If you build it, and make it convenient and safe to use, people will use it. Look at what happened in Salt Lake with TRAX. Hopefully the same thing will happen with BRT here in Orem and Provo. As gas prices increase, I know people are increasingly looking to bicycles to do their local trips, so I agree that it may well take additional incentive, but it makes it much easier if you have the infrastructure in place.