Walking Through the News

Here are two stories that I recently read that keep popping back up in my head.

The first one was this from NPR station KPLU in Seattle:

Study: Residents of walkable areas don't always walk more

Here is a bit from the story:

Two different types of walking

One clue emerges if you look at walking as having two different flavors. There’s recreational walking — you know, people who “go for a walk.” It’s healthy. It can be social.  

Other people walk in order to get somewhere or get things done. That’s transportation walking. 

This study, which had higher numbers of women who are white and middle-to-upper socioeconomic status, could have had more women who walk for recreation – and maybe these women are so motivated that it doesn’t really matter where they live. They might even drive to a park or a trail just to go walking.

An expert on teasing apart these types of walking, Brian Saelens of Seattle Children's Research Institute, says "transportation" walking depends a lot on where you live and work.

“It’s not that people are going to walk miles and miles to get to a destination,” Saelens said. “They have to be close enough so that the tradeoff between walking and driving makes sense for them, to say, ‘Oh, I might as well take a walk, because its just as fast or close to as fast.”’

In studies that look more carefully at how much people walk, by putting a tracking device on them, instead of relying on their recall, Saelens has found transportation walking can go under-reported. People forget that they walked to the bus, or to a store, because they weren't intentionally walking.

Recreational walking, which is what people usually talk about and remember, may depend less on the physical environment.

Right now U-Heights has a mix of transportation walkers (mostly UI Hospital employees) and recreational walkers. We have few destinations to draw more transportation walkers, perhaps the Sunset Wide Sidewalk, due to be completed by fall 2013, may encourage some. Having destinations in U-Heights besides Stella might encourage more walking.

Here's a story I read Monday night. This one comes from an interesting little site called PlaceMakers.

Healthy, or Unhealthy, by Design

 Here's a quote from that story that really struck me:

“The trouble is that in the last half century, we have effectively engineered physical activity out of our daily lives. Health is determined by planning, architecture, transportation, housing, energy, and other disciplines at least as much as it is by medical care. … The modern America of obesity, inactivity, depression, and loss of community has not ‘happened’ to us; rather we legislated, subsidized, and planned it.” And that strong statement is according to three doctors, Andrew Dannenberg, Howard Frumkin, and Richard Jackson in their book, Making Healthy Places."

This is a different take on walking too, in digging into the Fuquay-Varina community mentioned in the story, it is a town of 18,000 so quite a bit bigger than U-Heights, but still a "small" town. The idea of  "suburban retrofit" is an excellent description of One University Place. For more information check: 

* PUD Design

* How Big is theFront Building?

* How Big is the Back Building?