Improve the suburbs, improve your health
Suburban infrastructure makes healthy habits hard.
Like many people, I went home for the holidays. And this year, the trip took a toll: After a week or so in suburban Ohio, I gained five pounds.
This could be blamed on a number of things, from diet to exercise. But it also may simply have to do with how little I was physically moving: According to my phone’s health app, I was walking nearly two miles less a day than my average.
That’s largely because suburban infrastructure encourages driving: Cul-de-sacs, parking lots, and stand-alone homes all create sprawl that pull things apart. This, combined with the lack of bus routes and bike lanes, means a trip I normally would take by foot or bike in my hometown of Washington, D.C., was done by car in suburban Ohio.
This is obviously a climate issue: Driving a car creates more climate pollution than riding a bike or walking, which is why people who live in the suburbs, on average, emit twice as much pollution than people who do not.
But, as my waistband showed last week, it’s also a health issue. Climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe writes:
“Our health depends on the planet’s health. Just as smart individual choices in diet and lifestyle benefit our short- and long-term health, so, too, smart societal choices can reduce both the severity of climate change and its impact on our health.”
By making walking or biking nearly impossible, though, suburban infrastructure eliminates the individual choices we have to live healthier lifestyles. So when it comes to exercise, people who live in the suburbs have a distinct disadvantage: They must carve out time to exercise, rather than integrate it into their daily lives.
For example, I walk an extra two miles every day in the city not necessarily because I like walking, but because it’s more convenient: To drive through narrow one-way streets with limited parking is way more of a hassle than simply going by foot or bike.
The good news for those in the suburbs is that street infrastructure is often localized, meaning you don’t need state or federal laws to make a city more walkable or bikeable. Local governments can repaint streets, install bike lanes, erect traffic barriers and signs, and fund bike-share programs.
Biking specifically offers a particularly effective solution for the suburbs. As urban planner Dan Piatkowski writes in his book, Bicycle City,
“Bicycles are cheap, convenient, and useful. They are safe and efficient and do not inhibit other uses of public streets. Bike infrastructure costs nothing compared with wide roads and parking lots, but also compared with public transit.”
And biking is also a fantastic way to exercise.
Of course, exercise isn’t a bike’s only role. Though that’s unfortunately how bikes are often treated. While I was home, for example, my parents’ bikes were stowed away in the shed, treated more as a hobby for warmer months than a viable alternative to the SUVs in the garage.
The thing is, many places my parents frequent are close enough to comfortably bike: The historic town square is two miles away, and several restaurants, shops, grocery stores, bars, and a movie theater are all within a mile.
In other words, much of the lack of biking in the suburbs has less to do with distance than it does with infrastructure, as well as the mindset associated with that infrastructure.
For example, most suburbs comprise wide roads built for speed, not safety, which not-so-subtly signals to cyclists that they’re unwelcome here.
So I don’t really blame people for jumping in their cars when the alternative is biking alongside pickup trucks hurling down the road at 45 mph.
Our ability to bike and walk — and live a healthy life — shouldn’t be dictated by where we live. Even though my lifestyle is drastically different from my parents, we both like walking and biking. But every time I go home, it doesn’t feel that way.
For that, we have suburban infrastructure to blame. Which means we also have suburban infrastructure to change.