BOULDER — To the iconic sounds of Joni Mitchell wailing “They paved over paradise and put in a parking lot,” the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation assembled a new coalition here last month. Planners, architects, and developers — people you’d ordinarily see at an Urban Land Institute gathering — sat down with doctors, fitness experts and public health officials.
The worriers over growth and girth got together in still walkable Boulder for the launching of the RWJ-sponsored Active Living Network . RWJ, well known for its health care interests, believes this network will court creative new community design that promotes more active lifestyles. They will fund 25 regions for demonstration projects, hoping to seed the growth of more walking and biking paths, plus all sorts of changes in physical design that encourage more active living. RWJ is looking for a shift in America’s culture that leaves behind the sedentary style of the past quarter century.
Painting a dark picture, Dr. Michael Pratt of the Center for Disease Control reminded everyone that almost two-thirds of us are overweight, and about a third dangerously obese — at a societal cost of more than $100 billion a year. “Trips taken by foot are half what they were 25 years ago,” he said. And physical education in schools has all but disappeared. Only tobacco causes more deaths each year than lack of exercise, which caused Mark Fenton of the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center at Chapel Hill (the Active Living Network’s home) to ask why the insurance industry is so slow to understand this issue.
For a half-century we have built places to live that are hostile to walking, Shelley Poticha, Executive Director of the Congress for the New Urbanism reminded the group. But there’s good news: people are transforming this market, she said. More than 400 national projects are now under way emphasizing greater walkability. People are paying a 25-40 percent premium to buy property in places where you don’t have to drive for everything you have to do.
It is still an uphill march, though. “Walking is still way more dangerous than flying,” said Tom Brahms, head of the Institute of Transportation Engineers. He reminded everyone in the room of the common experience of leaving an office for a lunch appointment, or to run an errand, and being able to see one destination from another, but finding it necessary to use a vehicle to get from one spot to another.
Harriett Tregoning, Special Secretary of Smart Growth in Maryland, said “If pedestrians ever blocked the roads the same way that vehicles block pedestrian paths, there’d be a riot.” Most people at this conference welcomed the riot as an overdue cultural comment. We heard how fast the Safe Routes to School idea is forging ways to walk to school, despite a generation of building schools so no one could safely walk to them.
The conference concluded that a campaign was needed, not merely to restore choices of ways to get places we need to go, but to take on the fight of a fatty nation. In the forefront of that fight will be the reauthorization of the federal transportation statutes and the challenge to reward projects that integrate health components. We all marked the tea3 website in our notebooks and PDAs.
Ironically, the food at this conference was, while extraordinarily healthful, also abundant, reminding every participant that this is not just a policy question, but a matter of personal discipline. We had three days of seeing signs posted near elevators priming us to use the stairs. We left with order blanks for pedometers, so we would know if we walked our 10k steps per day. More MP3 and Willie Nelson put us “On the Road Again.” Nancy Sinatra’s “These boots were made for walking” exposed a generation gap.
With peer pressure peaking, it was easy in Boulder to walk what we talked. But what will it take to reverse the habits of millions? Can an American culture so completely dependent on cars and oriented to passive entertainment accept this noble and needed idea? Is community design the catalyst for changing that culture?