Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA)
August 29, 2003
First comes the suburban sprawl, then the spread as study links car
dependency to a few extra pounds
Author: Lauran Neergaard ASSOCIATED PRESS
Edition: CITY-D; Section: NATIONAL; Page: A06
Sprawling suburbs where it is hard to get around without a car may make residents fatter: Americans
who live in the most sprawling counties tend to weigh six pounds more than their counterparts in the
most compact areas.
Adding to the sprawl concern: Pedestrians and bicyclists are much more likely to be killed by passing
cars in this country than in parts of Europe where cities are engineered to encourage physical activity and whose residents typically are skinnier and live longer than the average American.
Those are conclusions of major new studies published yesterday that call on urban planners and zoning
commissions to consider public health in designing neighborhoods.
"How you build things influences health in a much more pervasive way than I think most health
professionals realize," said Dr. Richard Jackson of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
who helped edit the research, published in the American Journal of Public Health and the American
Journal of Health Promotion.
"Look at many new suburbs - there are not any sidewalks at all. . . . The result is we just don't walk,"
said John Pucher of Rutgers University, who uncovered the U.S.-European disparities.
There is growing recognition that ever-fatter Americans' tendency to be sedentary is at least partially
due to an environment that discourages getting off the couch and out of the car. Do adults walk three
blocks to the bus stop, or drive to work? Can children walk to school? Is there a walking or biking path
to the post office, restaurant, a friend's house?
In a sprawling community, homes are far from work, stores and schools, and safe walking and biking
are difficult. The research reported yesterday marks the first attempt to pinpoint just how much that
matters.
Rutgers University urban planner Reid Ewing rated the amount of sprawl in 448 counties that surround
metropolitan areas - counties home to two-thirds of the population - and then tracked CDC data on the
health of 200,000 area residents. All other factors being equal, each extra degree of sprawl meant extra
weight, less walking, and a little more high blood pressure, he concluded. Someone living in the most
sprawling county - Geauga County outside Cleveland - would weigh 6.3 pounds more than if that same
person lived in the most compact area, Manhattan.
The nation's most compact areas were four boroughs of New York City - Manhattan, Brooklyn, the
Bronx and Queens; San Francisco County; Jersey City in Hudson County, N.J.; Philadelphia; and
Boston's Suffolk County. The most sprawling were outlying counties of Southeast and Midwest metro
areas: Cleveland's Geauga; Goochland County outside Richmond, Va.; and Clinton County near
Lansing, Mich. In the 25 most compact counties, 22.8 percent of adults had high blood pressure and
19.2 percent were obese. In the 25 most sprawling counties, those rates were 25.3 percent and 21.2
percent, respectively.
Those are not huge differences, Ewing acknowledged. But the risk from sprawl equaled certain other
risk factors for obesity and hypertension, such as eating few fruits and vegetables, he said. Far worse
were Pucher's findings that per trip, American pedestrians are roughly three times more likely to be
killed by a passing car than are German pedestrians - and more than six times more likely than Dutch
pedestrians. For bicyclists, Americans are twice as likely to be killed as Germans and more than three
times as likely as Dutch cyclists. In Europe, people make 33 percent of their trips by foot or bicycle,
compared with just 9.4 percent of Americans' trips.
Pucher said the extra activity had to be healthy, as life expectancy in the Netherlands and Germany
was about two years longer than in the United States, and obesity rates were lower. Why can these
Europeans walk and bike more, and more safely, than Americans? It's not just travel distance - 41
percent of U.S. trips are shorter than 2 miles, yet most are by car. Instead, Pucher cited Dutch and
German policies that encourage more sidewalks and bike paths, traffic calming, auto-free zones in
cities, extensive road-sharing education for drivers and cyclists, and pedestrian-friendly urban design.
Some groups plan to use the research to back so-called smart-growth initiatives, including a battle in
Congress next month over whether $600 million in transportation funds should go for safer cycling and
walking programs and other transit alternatives, or for highway construction. Some U.S. cities are
copying Europe's policies, said Andy Clarke of the League of American Bicyclists. Education and
urban design allowed Portland, Ore., to increase bicycle ridership by 143 percent in the last decade
without increasing crashes, he said.
The kind of urban redesign the new research envisions will take time, the CDC's Jackson cautioned.
"It's really about the communities and environments we're going to give our children and our
grandchildren."