Investments in a Healthy Community

origianlly published in the Spartanburg Journal, October 2010

Why all the recent interest in “active living”?  A quick glance at statistics on obesity rates in the United States offers a telling story: since 1980, obesity rates have more than tripled; according to the Centers for Disease Control more than two out of three Americans are obese or overweight.

Ask folks about these statistics, and most will focus on social dynamics: too much television, laziness, the proliferation of video games, and the stranger-danger fears that keep parents from allowing their children to walk to school or the park.  Sometimes they will get to other causes, like poor nutrition in school lunches, or not enough physical education. 

What they never refer to are the running and aerobics crazes, the proliferation of gyms, the intense focus on healthy eating and exercising.  According to marathonguide.com, more Americans participated in and finished a marathon in 2009 than ever before.  The number of marathons in the US also increased by about 10% last year.  How can these two sides of the same issue exist together?

This is where the active living piece comes in.  As a society, we have become less active in our daily lives.  According to the US Department of Transportation, only 13% of school age children walked to school in 2001, where 41% walked in 1969.  For a variety of reasons, new schools are typically sited far from the neighborhoods they serve.  Many are built in areas where the road system is not adequate to handle so many cars, much less to support children walking and biking to school. 

Add to that dynamic our disjointed community design caused by the ways that conventional zoning separates uses such as residential and commercial spaces, forcing residents to drive rather than walk to the store for a gallon of milk.  While we may walk for exercise, we are not walking to lunch from work, or walking home from school, or biking to the post office or the coffee shop. 

Another factor in our bodily expansion is that obesity inordinately affects low income populations.   These communities tend to have fewer healthy food outlets like grocery stores and produce stands, and crumbling infrastructure, lack of adequate play areas, and high crime rates only exacerbate the problem.

It is indeed the activity of our daily lives that makes the difference in our fitness.  When the CDC recommends that adults exercise a half hour a day, or 150 minutes a week, we wonder where to find those extra minutes.  We feel as though we need to go out to exercise. 

I take care of my half hour a day riding my bike to and from work.  But I’m an active person, and have been riding in urban settings for over 25 years.  The absence or presence of bike lanes doesn’t affect whether or not I ride.  But the absence of a neighborhood grocer makes it hard to use my bike for that errand.  The difficulty of crossing major streets like Pine and Church Streets keeps me from walking or biking with my kids to the library. 

That’s why you’re seeing more bike lanes in Spartanburg, and sidewalk improvements like curb ramps, which allow those in wheelchairs and those pushing strollers to move about more easily.  That’s why Partners for Active Living and others advocated for complete streets resolutions that Spartanburg City and County Councils adopted in 2006 and 2007, which encourage efforts to ensure the safety of all users—pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, and bus riders—by including plans for sidewalks and bike lanes in all roadway projects. 

These kinds of policy changes, and the physical changes that go along with them, will serve as truly sustainable measures paving the way to “active living.”  We should consider any costs associated with them as investments in a healthy community.