2003 ASPH Pre-Conference Workshop on Impacts of Sprawl and Community Design on Public Health
Erica McArthur : Active Living … by design I think the three toughest times to speak at a conference are right before lunch, during lunch, and right after lunch, so I’m O-for-two. I’m right in the middle of lunch and after lunch, so stay with me if you can. I’m competing against you eating and eyeing the cookies and the other sweet treats out there, but please do get up and move around. I was just saying to Phil that I’m a bit of an outcast for the conference. I have a background in policy work. I’m not a public health professional, but I’ve worked with public health folks for four years now in trying to bridge the disciplines of planning and transportation with public health to create more active communities. And usually what I tell folks is to try and influence the decision makers to change the policies so that we can create more active communities, but I go also a step beyond that and say just don’t be content with influencing those decision makers, you need to become one yourself. And I take that to heart. I’m a planning board member in my local community and serve on lots of boards that impact transportation and land-use planning and try and have that public help voice there when I can. So why this, why now? Why are we talking about this? You’ve seen lots of trends this morning, and I’m going to quickly just skip over those because I don’t want to necessarily beat you over the head with it, but by now you should be getting it, where we are with our trends. We’ll also talk about some solutions; some support out there that we see both among just the American public but also with our researchers that are working hard to fill those gaps that we have in our research and data; and then talk about the practice, putting all of this into practice, which is when Phil Bors will jump up to the mic. So trends. We’ve noted that we’re becoming an overweight, sedentary nation, and so we try and make fitness a little more accessible for folks, but that’s not quite what we had in mind. They don’t necessarily need that escalator to get up there and even with the escalator, even by making it a little easier for folks to get there, we still see a flat line in trends over the years as far as how many people are getting and staying active. And what happens is--I think Penny had used this slide earlier--we’re raising our most sedentary and inactive generation of kids in
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American history. I was shocked to hear that statistic that over 75 percent, 78 percent of our children are not meeting the Surgeon General requirements. We’re seeing a lot of that energy in and not too much energy out. And Penny and others have also mentioned these trends in our walking and bicycling trips compared with our automobile trips. We see a steady increase in our trips by auto as our walking trips are declining. And it’s really crazy when you think about the fact that 25 percent of those trips are one mile or less but 75 percent of those are made by foot. It would seem logical--or excuse me, made by car. They should be made by foot. It would seem logical that we could walk that distance, but we can’t. Again, another slide you’ve seen. But it really is sad that our streets have become mean streets. You have to go out in a herd or a pack in order to feel safe. These ladies are smart and linking arms and trying to brave the traffic. But when you really look at the numbers and the statistics, our facilities that we have for pedestrians are paltry to say the least. We put pedestrians at risk every year in America with about 5,000 killed annually, and 12 percent of all traffic fatalities are pedestrians or bicyclists, even though they only account for five percent, or five percent of our trips are made on foot. So what’s the culprit? There are lots of reasons. One has to do with the way we’re designing our communities. Certain community designs, as you’ve seen with lots of the aerial photos of the lollypop suburban development that were mentioned before, when you have that type of community design, you increase your trip distances, your vehicle trips increase, and your walking and bicycling declines. And that has a significant impact on whether or not we’re going to be overweight or obese. And we see that when we start to mix our land uses, when we implement a different kind of community design, we make it interesting. We connect things. We have different uses than just one type of use. We see an added benefit of generating approximate half the car trips of suburban-type developments, and you see four times as many walking trips. So are we really unhealthy if we live in this type of neighborhood? An article in the June 20th “New York Times” asks, “Does living in the suburbs make you fat? Probably, say several urban planners, Lawrence D. Frank among them, who are studying how the design of communities affects human health. And the reason, they say, is that people have to drive everywhere. “We’re not at the point now that we know that sprawl
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makes you fat,” said Lawrence Frank, associate professor of urban planning at the University of British Columbia, “but if you choose to live in a sprawling environment, you’re more likely to be overweight.” So what are we going to do? And heaven forbid your child wants to walk to school. Let’s say my child, “Red,” wants to walk to school, and we live in that green circle house there. It’s a half-mile away to the school. You saw the wolf come up. There’s lots of scary things there, so I get in my fancy car, and I drive her five miles to school when, in fact, it’s only half a mile away. And as Kate pointed out, the median distance to school is about two miles for the folks that she was working with. Some of the barriers that she mentioned, that wolf that came up, were long distances. Half a mile isn’t a long distance. Traffic, there’s probably some traffic issues there. Adverse weather, that’s logical, and crime danger. But here with this particular slide, we see that community design has a lot to do with it. We see the housing separated out, the school’s up at the top, and there are just probably no facilities in the middle there. So let’s take a look at “Red’s” neighborhood. I would imagine she could at least walk or play in the neighborhood and if you look, you can tell a little bit, there are some sidewalks in that neighborhood, but I see cars parked on them. And let’s say this is a typical street in the neighborhood for children. How safe is this street? How inviting is it? Do you see anybody walking in this street? It’s pretty empty. There is a sidewalk there, and there’s a sign even: “Be on the lookout for pedestrians.” But the posted speed limit is 25. How fast do you think cars go in this neighborhood? Unidentified Speaker: Forty. Unidentified Speaker: Forty. Yeah, the design speed for this road is about 40 miles an hour. You’ve got a wide-open street there that just begs for speed and we find that if you want to increase your walking trips, what you should do is try and increase the connectivity of the street network; have a greater number of intersections than blocks--this block is pretty long; and streets that are calm, narrow, complex, and visually interesting. We do have a lot of pretty trees here, but it’s just not visually interesting. There’s nothing there that’s going to make you take notice of something different. There’s not a lot of friction, so to speak, and friction can be pedestrians, as Milt mentioned. This has now become our kiss-and-go line for
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schools. If you’re familiar with that, that’s that line, if you are driving your child to school where you can drop them off at the door and you motor on home. But this is typical for most any rural school especially, but suburban schools, where you’ve got cars queued up out on the main street there--and I imagine within a year or so this is going to be widened to accommodate all the traffic that’s going into this school. You’ve got one way in and one way out. And there was the mention earlier of buses and the safety aspect of that and trying to increase bus ridership and I say, not to discount buses, that it’s smart for us to partner with buses because at some point the child has to walk to get on the bus. And then once they get off the bus, maybe the buses drop them off at a walking spot where they can walk the rest of the distance to school. So there are some advantages to trying to get kids on the bus as opposed to having one child per car going into the school. But there aren’t even any walking facilities here on this line. So what are some solutions? Well, you’ve heard lots of solutions today. You’ve seen lots of not very good situations, and you’ve seen some solutions. Obviously, we can start by making our streets safer. Just make walking part of the culture. Make it so that we don’t have to worry about crossing the street. This shouldn’t be so hard to cross the street, and when you start designing streets for pedestrians and making them safer for pedestrians, you actually make them safer for motorists as well. As Milt mentioned, when you have those skinny streets that make cars slow down, it’s actually safer for cars as well. You can implement principles of active community design. Whether you’re designing new communities, which is the case for a lot of Greenfield development where there’s farmland or previously undeveloped property that’s now being developed, you have that opportunity to create more of an active community, a traditional neighborhood development. But even when you’re retrofitting--because we have a lot of urban centers that need retrofitting, that need some improvements--implementing some of those designs with infield development, trying to have higher density, mixing your uses, making the streets more walkable and bikeable and above all else, making the destination points interesting. If they’re not interesting, it’s really hard for people to want to walk somewhere. Another research question that was posed to 12,000 people asked, “If we make places more walkable--that is, denser, more mixed use,
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more pedestrian-friendly, and more interconnected--do people, in fact, walk more; and if they walk more, are they healthier?” Well, you can imagine what the responses were. The authors determined that people who live in areas of low-building density, i.e., suburbs, tend to weight more than people in higher-density, mixed-use areas, and that’s accounting for income, age, sex, and ethnicity. I’d love to see us move away from auto dependency and replace that with an avid addiction to walking and cycling. When we implement those principles of active community design, we get these active spaces and in turn active people. And I mean active people in a variety of ways; not just physically active but politically active. We’re referencing Alan’s discussion of social capital. When you give people opportunities so they can interact with their neighbors, that stock of social capital goes up. They feel a little bit more empowered to participate in a planning process and obtain those shared goals of perhaps a more walkable community. You also get safer routes to school. You’ve got those clearly marked crossing areas there. You’ve got the crossing guard, which could be a teacher or a volunteer, and you reduce that snatching factor when you’ve got more kids out and more of a presence. That comes up a lot, that fear of your child being abducted and we find that that’s really one of the least likely things that’s going to happen to your child on the way to school. They’re more at risk for a traffic injury or fatality, and so we really need to focus on fixing the facilities first. And when we fix those facilities--and let’s say we do have that increase in social capital and people feel more empowered to get out and interact with their neighbors, then you’re going to have the opportunity and the ability for kids to walk to school and get those active routes to school. As Kate mentioned, it’s a unique opportunity to increase physical activity when we have safe routes to school and it’s also such a nice way to pull together all the efforts that we’ve been mentioning here today. Who can argue with wanting to have your kids be healthier and more active and actually a little more aware and alert when they get to school? So what sort of support do we have for this? There’s actually more support out there than you think and being a political scientist by nature and a political animal, we need to really focus on that public policy support and letting our legislators and our congressmen know that this is something, in fact, that we do want to spend money on. And we
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have an important opportunity coming up in September when our U.S. House reconvenes to take up the transportation enhancements funding debate. The Surface Transportation Policy Project produced these slides that reference the amount of support we have out there in regards to walking and funding for it. Americans, in fact, do want to walk more and when asked the question, “Would you rather walk or drive,” we see that over half say they would prefer to walk just for their everyday errands and to go to specific places or for exercise. So what about the real bottom line, the money? Yes, I would like to see federal funds used to make walking safer. You see over half either somewhat favor or strongly favor federal funds going to make walking safer, and that’s even at the expense of building new roads; which most people think we’d want bigger, newer roads and unfortunately, we had lots of folks in our House and Senate feel that way and effectively eliminate our enhancement funding so far. We still have a little bit of opportunity. We also see that Americans support safe routes to school. Again, we see over half showing somewhat or strong support for money going towards safer routes to school, making it safer and easier for children to walk to school, even if this means less money to build new highways. I think that’s revolutionary. So what kind of research support do we have? There’s been numerous names and articles mentioned already this morning. This is not an exhaustive list. It’s just an example of what we have out there now. The four names that I have up there are predominant articles that I have up there now. All focus on the environmental and policy determinants, environmental and policy factors, interventions and correlates related to walking and bicycling and physical activity. Our planning partners also are working hard to turn out some new information and some evidence in data that we need to make these cases, again, all looking at travel in the built environment, community planning, the impacts of mixed use and density, and then our national organizations. I’m going to highlight a few of these for you. The Centers of Disease Control, obviously, churning out the word ACEs, “active community environments.” I jumped on that bandwagon and called myself an active communities consultant. They influenced North Carolina in particular in the development of an ACEs policy guide, which I happen to have a copy here, newly released, and I was the primary author on with lots of contributors. But it’s
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also a very useful guide that really tries to connect land use, transportation planning, and public health, offering some real tips. The reason I mention it is because we see this as being a national example and a model that other states can then replicate to suit their own what’s very North Carolina specific. The National Trust for Historic Preservation, another organization up there that’s putting time, effort, and money into this debate, drafted the report “Why Johnny Can’t Walk to School,” which again, influences lots of spin-off research. In North Carolina, UNC Chapel Hill’s Center for Urban and Regional Studies just finished a report called “Good Schools, Good Neighborhoods,” looking at the impact of State school board policies on how walkable or accessible our schools are to children. And I think very important is that the American Planning Association has developed a planning advisory service, or a PAS, for all planners that will help them figure out how to design the physically active community. And you’ll find that planners are going to be our most receptive partners. They want to see communities developed like this, but they have a lot of difficulty moving that ball up the hill because they are oftentimes in a very political position. Before I turn it over to Phil Bors to talk about how we’re putting all of this into practice, just a few things that we heard today about our research and just some impressions that I came away with that a lot of this research, especially when we were talking about things like social capital, it’s very squishy. It’s very warm fuzzy, and how are we really going to quantify that, and where is that quantifiable data? And I would also encourage us to think about the qualitative data, those front-porch surveys; that warm, fuzzy stuff that we’re talking about; and putting some importance on that because we really need to push this ball forward. It is a very new area of research and area of practice, but it’s not one that we can’t partner with other disciplines, use the resources that they have, even start speaking the language that they have and becoming familiar with that language in order to create those active community environments.
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