The Walking Cure
Car-centric city sprawl adds to weight gain, so a movement is afoot to put us within walking distance
By Richard Lacayo

STEVE LISS FOR TIME COLUMBIA, MO: Local leaders proposed that all new streets have sidewalks. Right now, more than half do not

June 7, 2004
In Columbia, Mo., a lot of people are trying—really trying—to get their neighbors biking and walking. In case you haven't heard, exercise has many advantages. For anyone trying to keep off weight, the simple activity of putting one foot in front of another is surprisingly useful. So in mid-May, Mayor Darwin Hindman, who at 71 still bikes to work, kicked off Bike, Walk and Wheel Week to coax residents to commute and shop without cars. Mayor Hindman and local Congressman Kenny Hulshof led dozens of cyclists on a 4-mile ride. A week later, volunteers were serving breakfast all over town for anyone walking, cycling or rolling in a wheelchair.

There's just one problem. If you want to travel by foot or even by bike in Columbia, it's not that easy to get where you need to go. Most of the homes aren't located anywhere near stores. And just walking around the neighborhood can be a challenge, since more than half the streets lack sidewalks. Not long ago the local planning and zoning commission proposed an ordinance that would require broad pedestrian and cycling paths along new and rebuilt streets. But the town council tabled the measure until more could be learned about potential costs, promising to take a second look at it in June.

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"Everyone is created to walk," says Mayor Hindman. "But we have designed our streets to create barriers to an obvious, efficient activity." Columbia is not alone. Throughout most of the U.S., suburban sprawl has created a nation that has been supersized beyond walking distance. Homes tend to be far removed from shopping; compact, walkable downtowns are rare; traffic is fast and dangerous to pedestrians; and even sidewalks aren't to be taken for granted. Researchers will tell you that most Americans will not walk anyplace that's more than a quarter-mile away. In a recent poll, 44% of people questioned said it was difficult to walk to any destination from their home—any destination at all.

For a lot of reasons, the arguments against the spread-out design of U.S. cities and suburbs have been getting louder in recent years. Anybody stuck two hours in commuter traffic can tell you some of those reasons. But researchers have begun to recognize a previously unsuspected drawback to the way the U.S. is constructed. What they have found is a connection between sprawling suburbs and spreading waistlines. Very simply, people who live in communities where it's hard to get anywhere on foot are heavier than those who live in less car-dependent settings, whether densely settled cities like Boston and Chicago or just pedestrian-friendly towns. While diet remains an important factor in the obesity epidemic, it's becoming increasingly clear that Americans are shaped partly by how America is shaped.

A serious effort to examine that connection got under way at a meeting convened in 1997 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). To get people in different disciplines to start thinking about an obesity-sprawl connection, the CDC brought together city planners, architects, researchers, transportation engineers and even criminal-justice experts. (Why criminal-justice experts? Because safer streets are more walkable. There are a lot of pieces to this puzzle.) That meeting was a catalyst for the rise of the active-living movement, which got a major boost two years later when the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a philanthropic organization with an interest in health-care issues, stepped in with grant money.

One of the most important studies in this new field was published last summer. Led by Reid Ewing, research professor at the National Center for Smart Growth at the University of Maryland, the study examined data on more than 200,000 Americans living in 448 well-populated counties (nearly two-thirds of the U.S. population lives in those counties). Ewing found that people in sprawling counties weighed more than those in more compact ones. Residents of the most spread-out locale, Ohio's Geauga County, outside Cleveland, weighed on average 6.3 lbs. more than those living in the most condensed, Manhattan. Geauga County residents were also 29% more likely to have high blood pressure than New Yorkers. (So much for the stresses of city life.) One possible reason: people who lived in the 25 most sprawling counties walked an average of 191 min. a month, compared with 254 min. a month for those living in the 25 densest counties. "And there are thousands of Geauga counties," says Ewing. "There are very few really walkable places."

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