The Walking Cure

By Richard Lacayo

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.

"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."

Even more detailed evidence of the obesity-sprawl connection appears in a new study led by Lawrence Frank, a professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Frank surveyed nearly 11,000 people in Atlanta, compiling their body mass indexes (BMIs) and correlating those figures with the characteristics of the neighborhood within a kilometer of their homes, including whether shops and services were mixed in among the homes. He asked participants to keep a travel diary for two days to record where they went and how they got there.

What Frank discovered was that for every hour people spend in their cars, they are 6% more likely to be obese. For every kilometer--just over a half-mile--they walk in a day, they are 5% less likely to be obese. And if they live in a mixed-use environment (one in which there are shops and services near their homes), they are 7% less likely to be obese--probably because they walk more. "The policy implication of this study," says Frank, "is that if we're going to solve our public-health issues, we're going to have to address the built environment."

O.K., but how? The built environment is not easy to unbuild. In the late 1980s an architectural and city-planning movement called new urbanism grew to promote the construction of more densely developed and neighborly towns. It led to the construction of subdivisions, like Kentlands in Gaithersburg, Md., and the Disney-created town of Celebration, Fla., which were built from scratch along new-urbanist lines. The Urban Land Institute, a nonprofit group that studies planning issues, says 5% to 15% of new development in the U.S. is designed at least to some extent with pedestrians in mind.

But new-urbanist thinking has fostered the refashioning of some existing suburbs and city neighborhoods, which have been reconstructed to blend stores with homes and make foot travel easier and more appealing. One of those retrofits is City Place in West Palm Beach, Fla., a 72-acre, $600 million development built to create a kind of instant secondary downtown. (The city's original downtown is not far away.) At its heart is an open-air plaza surrounded by shopping as well as a 20-screen cineplex, designed to resemble the Paris Opera House, and nearly 600 residential units, including town houses, apartments and lofts.

If City Place had a motto, it could be "We have ways of making you walk." Before they sat down at their computers, its architects spent several weeks abroad studying rambling Italian towns. In the covered walkways of City Place you can find an echo of the archway arcades of Bologna, one of the world's great cities for strolling. Spanish steps, bridges and other features tempt your feet forward. And there are no traffic lights. In City Place, pedestrians always have the right of way.

The rubric to describe developments like City Place is "urban living centers. Opened in 2000, City Place was one of the first, but it has spawned imitators in San Jose, Calif., and Charlotte, N.C. And it has been a hit, drawing more than 7 million visitors a year. Ophthalmologist Todd Shuba, 34, used to choose where to spend his lunch break by which restaurant had the most convenient parking lot. These days he walks a half-mile at least three times a week to eat at one of nearly 20 restaurants at City Place. "I walk a lot further, but I get the benefit of having everything right here," says Shuba, who might be pleased to know that walking a lot further is another one of the place's benefits.

Sometimes the solution to an obesity-sprawl problem is a matter not just of reconfiguring a town but of rethinking its roadways. For instance, only 17% of all schoolchildren walk to school, according to research firm Belden Russonello & Stewart. "The vast majority of children live within one mile of school," says Rich Killingsworth, a professor at the University of North Carolina. "But only 28% of those children walk there." Killingsworth is director of the Active Living by Design program, which funds projects that help communities become more pedestrian friendly. Programs like Safe Routes to School find ways to make it easier for kids to walk. "You can extend sidewalks to schools," he says. "You can calm traffic around the school. You can minimize parking lots so fewer students are driving to school."

Another major goal of active-living proponents is to change the raft of zoning regulations, local ordinances and building codes--most of them adopted after the first great wave of post--World War II suburbanization--that were explicitly designed to discourage denser development. Very often those rules clearly forbid mixed-use areas (residential and commercial in the same neighborhood, for example), which would bring people within walking distance of a store to buy a quart of milk. And until we change how America is built, how Americans are built will be a continuing problem. --With reporting by Kathie Klarreich/West Palm Beach and Steve Korris/Columbia

Watch Good Morning America on Tuesday, June 1, for more on how communities promote walking

With reporting by Kathie Klarreich/West Palm Beach and Steve Korris/Columbia