Slashdot Mirror
Does Sprawl Make Us Fat?
Ant writes "A Science News article talks about the relationship between city design and health. New cross-disciplinary research is exploring whether urban sprawl makes us soft, or whether people who don't like to exercise move to the sprawling suburbs, or some combination of both." From the article: "So far, the dozen strong studies that have probed the relationships among the urban environment, people's activity, and obesity have all agreed, says Ewing. 'Sprawling places have heavier people... There is evidence of an association between the built environment and obesity.' ... However, University of Toronto economist Matthew Turner charges that 'a lot of people out there don't like urban sprawl, and those people are trying to hijack the obesity epidemic to further the smart-growth agenda [and] change how cities look.' ... 'We're the only ones that have tried to distinguish between causation and sorting... and we find that it's sorting,' [says Turner]. 'The available facts do not support the conclusion that sprawling neighborhoods cause weight gain.'"
The objections quoted in TFS are debunked quite well in the linked science article. Additionally, research earlier this year shows teenagers living in sprawling suburbs were more than twice as likely to be overweight as teens in more compact urban areas
;-)
These kids have never moved, never had a choice about where they live and are still much fatter.
It's a no brainer really. Less walking opportunities = less energy expenditure = more stored energy (as well as eating crap on those long, boring car journeys to work/school to save on cooking time at home so you can sit in front of the idiot box).
Anyway, the failure of town planners is going to work out by itself in the end. As oil prices skyrocket & people in the suburbs grow fatter, the solution become obvious. Liposuction clinics combined with gas stations
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Let me try to sort this out:
YES, not having to walk around very much will make it more likely you won't get the exercise necessary not to be fat.
NO, it does not "cause" it (in the sense they want you to take it); you can still make the choice to exercise on your own, irrespective of how much you need to walk in a day for other purposes.
YES, there's probably a correlation between "how much people in this city have to walk" and "how fat they generally are" that persists after the appropriate controls.
NO, that's a bad, ad-hoc reason to fix urban sprawl. Urban sprawl is bad because it leads to time-wasting congestion and forces people to have to use cars, which sucks for anyone who can't or doesn't like to drive, and exposes people to the risk of energy price fluctuations unnecessarily. It also contributes to pollution. There, I just made a strong case why sprawl is bad, without resorting to being a health Nazi.
I'd like to plug my latest joural entry, which describes a way cities could transition gradually to less sprawl, without tedious regulation, government-run services, and invasive control over people's lives. In short: put up tolls heavy enough to clear congestion. This creates the financial incentives necessary for market-driven mass transit, which in turn makes denser development more economical and desirable to live in.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
In many sprawling communities, walking past the driveway/subdivision is asking to die.
That's not hyperbole, but a basic consequence of planning that is downright hostile to anyone who isn't behind the wheel of a car. I don't believe cars should be eliminated, but car-dependance is a truly awful thing that I'm glad that I've been able to break free of...but I don't know for how long. The attitude of the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority isn't friendly to mass transit. In the words of their last General Manager "the automobile won" and light rail is obsolete. Buses are the future, apparently. In the last few decades, automobile registrations in Boston have tripled as rail lines have been shut down or cut back dramatically in favor of surprise bustitution that suddenly becomes permanent.
It's depressing enough to see a new cookie-cutter car-dependant community rise up where a forest used to be, but it's even worse when a city with an excellent transit system that encourages people to ride the train then walk decides that it wants to be just like PinePointeAutumnPreserveRegistryReserveGrove Habitation Area #49485776893-B and compel people to pick up the bad habits of the suburbs.
that and civic design. Here in Houston I challenge you to ride a bike from point A to point B. There are no sidewalks, no back roads that go through, no bike lanes, what bike lanes that do exist are right next to fast moving over sized commercial loads that reguard that as a "vehicle sprawl" lane. Figure in unstable buisness environments that virtually guarantee that if you move close enough to work to walk/bike you will lose your job and be forced to work forty miles away.
When I lived in Phoenix, I rode my bike everywhere. Now that I live in Houston (one of the most sprawled cities in existance) I have gained massive amounts of weight, and regularly commuted 3+ hours a day.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
I'm 260 lbs
I eat 1 burrito for breakfast, not huge, but small, low grease - chicken no beef, cheese and some garlic on a spinache tortilla.
For lunch I drink a bottle of mineral water and a V8.
For dinner I have a noodle bowl.
My weight is maintained and slowly losing. I walk quite a bit every day at work, and go out of my way to walk extra, lift weights and do some exercise. At this weight I'm stronger, more agile, and have better endurance than many of my coworkers who are obviously in a better height/weight ratio and close to my age. They all eat more than I do, less healthy food, and in all but a couple of cases do less exercise.
I have a coworker who's five years older than me. Weighs about 140 lbs, is four inches taller than me. He comes in eating onion rings, burgers and fries at the start of shift. Come lunch time he eats whatever he gets his hands on, often greasy. Through out the night (late shifters) he browses the building for cake, cookies, and whatever else may be left in the offices/work areas. He leaves and eats a couple of more meals, often greasy and sugary. On top of that he drinks at least a six pack in the morning after shift. I have one or two a week.
On your ration book setup he would starve, and I would gain massive amounts of weight if I took full advantage of it.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
We all generally EAT TOO MUCH! Our guts are too big and so our hunger satisfaction signal is delayed. Working out and being active is good and all, but that's not the biggest part of what's wrong. It's WHAT we eat and how much of it we eat. That's why these stomach stapling operations are so remarkably effective. It's clearly not that these people have been working out too little, but that they have been eating too much. The solution is most simple and direct.
EAT LESS.
I'm kind of over-weight myself... I'm working on it... sorta. I never claimed the answer would be easy... I'm just identifying the problem for what it really is. Working out and being more active to "compensate" for the enormous amount of food we take in doesn't leave much time with family, friends or work. It's nearly impossible to work out enough to compensate for the diets most of us indulge in... just eat less.
It's not the sprawl it's the transportation system. Lots of other countries have urban sprawl but the fact that people often use public transportation leads to them walking a lot more to get from the train stop to wherever they are going. In the US in almost every city the entire road system is built on the premise that you have a car and that you will drive directly from your garage straight to the parking lot of wherever you are going and do almost no walking at all.
Why do we need to do a study on this though? It's useless information. We know the basic gist of why people get fat. The human body wants to store energy in case of emergency and runs itself on the premise of conserving energy when energy intake gets low. Thus the only real way to keep a fit body is exertion and a decent intake of calories. Instead of worrying about ways to cause people to exert themselves more how about we spend our money on real solutions like fixing the human body so it doesn't have to operate in a prehistoric fashion.
One site I check every few months is the Victoria Transit Policy Institure . They have a lot of resources on sustainable transportation policy. When I watched my previous employer start paying for additional parking spots for new employees, I looked to VTPI for information on parking cash out. Cash out is an incentive program to not drive - if it costs the company $30/month for a parking spot, cash out programs pay employees the savings from not providing a parking spot. This encourages people to bus and bike to work. In my case, the employer wasn't interested, one of many reasons I no longer work there, but that's another story.
When I read the title of this article, I immediately though of VTPI. There is actually a PDF cowritten by Lawrence Frank which is listed on the VTPI main page, which is available from Smart Growth BC. Lawrence Frank is mentioned in TFA, and several of his studies are linked at the bottom. The Smart Growth BC PDF did not appear to be in the list of links at the bottom of the TFA at Science News Online. The PDF is 52 pages long, and is titled Promoting Public Health Through Smart Growth (also an HTML version from Google cache to avoid melting down Smart Growth BC's server). It's more about how to design your cities properly, to avoid the health issues cited in TFA. From the preface to the PDF:
I enjoy most of the information on the VTPI site, but then again, for me, they're mostly preaching to the converted. I'd rather relax and read on the bus for an hour, or enjoy a 1 hour bike ride to work than fight rush hour traffic in a car for a half hour.Slashdot - the place where you can look like a genius by restating the obvious
Let's throw out some other ideas, just for kicks. Maybe people who live in low-sprawl, compact cities like New York City, San Francisco, or Toronto...
You could think up some other possible alternative explanations, I'm sure.
Here's a question worth asking: Seems to me that the greater Los Angeles area has as much "sprawl" as anyplace in America. Are Angelenos fatter than the rest of the country? Doesn't seem like it, to me.
Breakfast served all day!
I'm a quite disappointed, if true that kids are overweight in suburbia. There's plenty of oppotunity: large parks to play in (which is free!) and at least where I live there are some local wooded trails. I've been biking, jogging and walking through those trails for some time now. One observation though is that most people using the parks have a dog. That might be one link.
But more than anything, people have to stop driving all over the place. One has to do with sheer laziness. Something the kids learn. I should feel safe walking on the streets (a question of coverage of sidewalks and not havng to cross major thorough fares with crazy drivers trying to run me over.
The big thing, IMO from stopping the laziness: big box stores. And its where a lot of people shop. In most of the communities I've observed in Ontario, Quebec, and NE U.S., the bix box stores tend to be at the outermost edges of the suburban areas. No easily accessible side walks, public transit. Its all poor city planing.
As an example, this summer, I decided I was going to go to shop at a big box store. The store is no more than 15 minutes each way walk. At least figuratively when you take the main road and drive over. But it was a nice day. So I walk for 10 minutes. I figure a shortcut/pathway I could take would surely lead to the store. Nope, city didn't build em. So I ended up taking the only way there. detour. Took an extra 10 minutes each way. Yeah, I drive now.
Strangely enough, it is only in America that inner-cities are more dangerous than suburbs. In Australia and Europe, inner cities are seen as desirable places to live compared to the suburbs.
Maybe the original idea was to escape factories, but now the US has far less manufacturing capacity, so that isn't it anymore... what is it? Low gas prices (compared to the rest of the world) keep suburbs cheap, and black people tend to live in cities so it's undesirable to whites?
Actually, fast food may be addictive too, according to this interesting article...
I come from Denmark but am staying in Minneapolis for a year. In Denmark you can walk to a nearby mall or at least a well-stocked convenience store pretty much no-matter where you live if you do not live too far from the central city. Where I live in Denmark I can *walk* to *everything* I need to do on a regular basis, and everything else is within convinient biking or bus distance. I don't have a car and I would have a use for a driver's license maybe once a year (when living in Denmark, that is).
Now, in Minneapolis, practically nothing is within walking distance no matter where you live and the bus system is an absolute pain to figure out even using their online planner. Not having a car around here is a serious social handicap, and it makes shopping a taxing experience, because everything is spread out within a huge area. I can't help but conclude that people around here actually *enjoy* spending alot of time in their cars, so that distance is an advantage to them.
Other than that, this is a very nice place, but for people who live here permanently, not having a car is simply not a workable option.
Bjarke Roune
Even downtown LA (synonymous with Bad City in many people's minds) is basically unaffordable to most *working* adults (unless you live in a place where most working adults can afford $1200+ rents or $300K condos). Heck even the Oakland waterfront is getting expensive and posh.
There are a number of reasons why Americans prefer to live in suburbs. White flight, as you mentioned, is one. Another is that most of us like our space. I grew up in a house where the back yard was totally secluded and we had a wooded lot to one side. Lots of privacy - you didn't look out your window right into someone else's. I'm in a dorm now. I love being near my friends, but the walls are paper thin. I can hear everything that goes on in the rooms beside me, and if it's loud enough, I can hear the speakers of the guy living across the building. A third reason is that since cities tend to grow outwards, houses in the suburbs are newer and nicer than inner city ones.
1. About "no brainers", lots of things looked like "no brainers" at various points, and turned up to be false. E.g., at some point it looked like a no brainer that a cannonball twice as heavy falls twice as fast. That's why we still do studies to try to prove or disprove it.
2. Teenagers and kids pick the bad habbits of their parents, and are fed by their fat parents, so it's not exactly that independent.
E.g., I can tell you that both me and my brother got to eat a lot of fat and sugar as kids, because that's what both our parents liked. And I mean pretty much literally everything made with very fat meat, fried in lots of fat, and pretty much everything doused in lots of fat as served. Then came mom's cakes which, delicious as they were, were an exercise in eating a lot of butter with a heck of a lot of sugar.
Mom turned from a slim girl into, well, something resembling the dwarf females in WoW even without living in the suburbs. She also destroyed her liver by now (though her taking generous doses antibiotics for anything and everything probably also helped.)
Guess what? So does everyone in the family, because we all were stuffed with the same things. Worse yet, taste is an educated thing, so my brother still swears by foods doused in generous amounts of fat. He got asked by his doctor around the age of 30 if he's an alcoholic, after seeing his liver numbers. The guy pretty much doesn't drink. He's also overweight.
I tried to resist, and in fact dinner time was pretty much the only conflict I had with my parents, but they weren't going to accept my being fussy at the dinner table. No, young man, you're gonna eat that big chunk of fat if you want any dessert. And you're going to finish everything on that heaped plate, at that. Figures. Other kids get told to eat their veggies.
Still, I had eventually at least managed to get them to heap my plate less. Most kids probably don't even put that kind of a resistance. My brother, for example, just gave up after a desperate last stand where he just stopped eating at all. And I'm not talking a rebellious teenager, but a primary school kid. You have to get one really desperate to do something like that. But after he got out of hospital, he just fell in line. Still, as I was saying, at least I had negotiated some half-way truce with my parents.
But then came a whole summer vacation at my grandma from dad's side, when I was about 10 years old. (Guess where dad had learned to like such foods?) She stuffed me into such a nice round shape, that you could swear I'm a South Park character. Literally. I ran around the garden and stuff all day long (not out of some clever plan to burn calories, but because that's what kids do), but the calories intake was just so hideously high, that nothing could get rid of them. The shock of seeing me literally beachball shaped was such that, well, let's just say my parents never left me in her care ever again.
Thank goodness, I did finally switch to eating half-way sane (well, I still like sugar) after moving away, so I'm the only one whose liver still sorta works. As I was mentioning, my brother didn't.
Anyway, sorry if this extreme example sounds like whining about my family, the point I'm trying to illustrate is actually: kids and teenagers don't have control over more things than where they live. It's not like those kids in the suburbs get otherwise free hand over what they eat. If their parents eat crap, the kids eat crap too, and learn to like eating crap. If their parents' idea of a family evening out is going to McDonald and eating a mayo-doused burger, the kids grow up with the idea that mayo is good food and that being taken to a junk food joint is good times, or even a sort of a reward. It gets associated, Pavlov-style, with doing something together with the parents and getting lots of dad's attention, which is good times for a kid. If the parents' idea of a family evening together is sitting together in front of the idiot box, the kids too get the idea that that's what you do in the evenings.
So, yes, the fatsoes who moved to the suburbs so don't even have to walk to the corner store, raise their kids to be fat too. How's that for a different causation?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I live in a city that can be defined as the opposite of sprawl: Venice (Venezia), Italy. Buildings here are closer one to another than any place I know of. Some "calli" (pedestrian passages) are as narrow as half meter. Cars just don't enter the city beyond the parkings at the end of the bridge that connects it to the mainland, and even bikes are not allowed. You just walk. Every time your way intersects a canal, you have to go up and down the steps of a bridge. Because of the high density, the time spent moving from place to place in everyday business is not different from that in car-only cities. Remove the time spent looking for a parking place (a big problem in most Italian cities) and you have a net time advantage. You don't see many obese people in Venice and even elders citizens tend to be healthier than in other places. People meet and talk in the streets. Goods travel almost exclusively on water, on a network that is completely separate from that of persons. One of the downsides is a very uncomfortable environment for disabled people: wheelchairs weren't an option when the city was built!
Nuffsaid
________
Don't know about his cat, but Schroedinger is definitely dead.
That is the exact reason why I am comparing Boulder to Cambridge. Comparable University population, comparable income as well (with all the business parks around cambridge it has average income in a similar bracket). The difference is in the way it is being developed.
South Cambridgeshire District Council and Cambridge City Council try to promote cycling by penalising cars without doing any effort whatsoever to award cycling and pedestrians. The pedestrian zone in mid-town is laughable in its size and does not cover key streets which are long overdue to be pedestrianised. There are buses running on them instead following the time proven UK approach that "Some animals (especially Stagecoach PLC) are more equal than the rest". The cycling network is unmaintained and has deliberate obstructions all over it so you cannot use it to get fast from point A to B. In addition to that it is outright dangerous in many places due to reduced visibility. Using the cycling paths parallel to most roads is suicidal because the stop lines for cars are drawn after the cycle path and the cars get out of the streets at speed without you seeing them and them seeing you (in fact the priority there should be reversed). The public transport deliberately disallows cycles and penalises cyclists as a matter of principle. All new developments are built without cycling in mind with low visibility, deliberate obstructions and "fake" cycle paths that have to cross a major road at least 5 times just because. I can continue for a long time, but the fact is a fact. The supposedly "green" politcritterz in the local (and country) government in Britain are a lying POS as far as any green development is concerned.
Well, and the results are obvious: compared to Boulder Cambridge looks sickeningly obese (I am not even trying to compare to MK and other fat-country-UK places like Hull).
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
I live in Detroit Michigan. Cars are considered holy shrines in this stupid town.
Even when you do live in a real neighborhood and not some burb the sidewalks may exist in form but they either do not exist in function or are way too dangerous to travel on for any real distance.
And yes, the manufactured small-town communities are either largely abandoned or mis-designed as a place you can drive to and then walk around 500 feet of sidewalk looking at overpriced shops and drinking burnt coffee for $5 a cup. No surprise that they fail in a few years.
But when you consider that companies now have offices which hold >1,000 people it makes a walk/bike commute rather difficult if you have to consider building the houses and other infrastructure (including stores) within that distance of the office building. Even if I did ride every day it would be a 15-20 mile ride for me. My question is -- how am I supposed to get to work in my work clothes (dress slacks, shirt, tie optional) when I have a ride of this distance. I might not be that welcome at work or I may have to resign myself to looking very rumply. How do you do it?
As opposed to most cities where you can take a long walk, use public transport + walk, you have a better chance getting "natural excercise" by the day, just walking.
Now look at small towns, where nothing is walking distance, and there are no sidewalks. You are forced to drive your car and you will move a lot less naturally, unless you go on a hike on the weekend or go to the gym. In cities many choose alternative transport, such as bicycles, while on highways you are not even allowed to ride a bike.
But no walking.
I moved out of the city, where I used to walk 5+ km a day, just commuting. Now I am a car potato, or ride a motorbike when weather allows and no formal dressing is required.
Other thing: I seem to see a lot more fat people in small towns and the countryside, and right now visiting the US it seems the same here.
Well just my 2c, I moved a lot more on foot/bicycle when I lived in the big city.
Sort of . . . School integration in the cities forced* white folks to relocate to the suburbs, taking their money with them. Now the good public schools are in the suburbs. Live in the city, and you send your kids to private schools, which cost extra. So now, if you have kids, it may be cheaper to buy a pricier house in the suburbs and not have to pay twice for schools (once in taxes, once in private tuition).
*In places where they "beat" integration, whites built entirely new, politicaly independent school districts in the suburbs.
I am not a crackpot.
At one time, I lived about 8 miles from work and would commute by bike. When you factored in traffic, lights, etc., my commute took about the same time as driving. I would also do a 12 mile loop over my lunch break so a typical day involved 28 miles of riding. Once a week, however, I would ride - again about 8 miles - to an evening group ride that was about 25 or 30 miles. I would discover that, if I did that 8 mile "warm-up" ride to the group ride, I tended to perform better than if I just drove to it. After the group ride was finished, it was about 7.5 miles from there to home.
Needless to say, I was 15-20 lbs lighter than I am today. Right now, I'm looking at a job offer where my office will, one again, be about 8-9 miles from home, only these days I have a mountain bike. Looking forward to it nonetheless.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Tokyo is an unfair example
Why? The original post said: "Market driven mass transit has been successful nowhere", it didn't limit that to car-oriented U.S. cities. I think Tokyo's a great example of how private companies can succeed handily at mass-transit given the right environment and good management.
a community can only support one primary mode of transportation. If most people drive to work then the road infrastructure will be pretty decent and public transportation horrible. If few people own cars it will be vice versa
I think it's a stretch to call Tokyo's road infrastructure "horrible". They have a lot of roads, and they're very high quality, but the population density is simply too high for U.S.-style car-obsession to ever be practical. If anything the roads in Tokyo are for the rich (there still seems to be a vague association of car ownership with success in urban Japan), but many normal people do own cars; they simply don't use them for commuting (that Just Wouldn't Work).
Some European cities get around this limitation by artificially injecting wads of taxpayer cash into the public transport infrastructure, so they can have functioning roads and public transport at the same time. But in the US very few communities would put up with this kind of "waste".
As I mentioned, Tokyo actually does have a pretty good road network -- and unlike much of the railroad infrastructure, the roads seem to be completely government funded. While there are no doubt a few highway-building boondoggles here and there, I assume most people wouldn't think of this as being "duplication", because the two networks (rail and road) serve different purposes, and both are vital components in the city's operation.
A place like NYC would seem to have a similar environment (too dense for reliance on the automobile, an established mass-transit "culture"), but NYC's mass-transit is embarrassingly primitive compared to Tokyo's, and I'd say part of this is probably the government-dominated decision-making in NYC. If you compare private and government railyway lines in Tokyo, the private lines are palpably more aggressive about expansion. Look at the Tokyu Corp financial report I linked to earlier in this thread: even with the huge costs of continual major construction (e.g., subway tunneling, new stations, major track and line expansion), they still manage a handy profit!
We live, as we dream -- alone....