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It think it does not to have to be an either/or kind of thing. People can still have cars if they want but I think our goal should be to make them more fuel efficient (which we have been doing) and find ways to make them needed for fewer tasks. We should find ways to make suburbs more efficient. I hear one poster on hear complaining by talking about how tough it is to pick up a child at a soccer practice from across town. I think that is kind of the point the OP was trying to make. Car dependence has lead to inefficient and time consuming arrangements and distances we have to travel.
You are right.
The Suburban Living Arrangement has turned many suburban house wives into chauffeurs - we even call them Soccer Moms! - when children used to walk or bike to school on their own. Result?: Obese children.
EXCERPT: "We live here for our children," is a response that you are likely to hear from many US suburbanites if you ask why they live so far from the cities, and maybe with a long drive to their jobs too. Giving a lawn and space to young children, may seem like the right and caring thing to do, and it involves various sacrifices on the part of the parents, especially the ones who commute. A typical pattern might be where one or both partners drive long distances to work, dependent on a car and regular gasoline purchases for transport to the office. Where there is "a full time Mom," her life maybe be dedicated to chauffeuring her children to school, and various other activities.
Last edited by nei; 02-19-2013 at 04:32 PM..
Reason: copyright violation
Environmental Health | Full text | Obesity, physical activity, and the urban environment: public health research needs Given a built environment in many US inner cities and urban neighborhoods that includes sidewalks and mixed land uses; that offers parks, playgrounds and public transportation; and that has a traditional gridded street pattern (small blocks with streets at right angles to each other) which fosters connectivity, we might expect that rates of physical activity and trends in obesity would be more favorable in inner city neighborhoods. But there appears instead a paradox whereby obesity, physical inactivity and associated diseases of diabetes and cardiovascular disease, are more prevalent among inner-city residents than among suburbanites.
Here's another study - showing the exact opposite:
Study Finds Car-Centric Neighborhoods Strongly Tied to Childhood Obesity
There’s a fairly obvious relationship between levels of physical activity and the layout of our streets and cities. Still, solid research on the link between childhood obesity and neighborhood design is scarcer than you might think.
Walkable neighborhoods with opportunities for active play were linked to lower obesity rates in a recent study by the Seattle Children's Research Institute. Photo: Wichita.gov
A new study from the Seattle Children’s Research Institute, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, helps fill in the picture. Comparing neighborhoods in San Diego and Seattle, the study found wildly different rates of obesity among children based on “place-related” factors, namely walkability and access to healthy foods.
. . . Children who lived in walkable areas, with a child-friendly park nearby and access to healthy food had 59% lower odds of being obese. Kids that lived in car-dependent neighborhoods with more fast food outlets had the highest levels of obesity (16%, which is the US average). But only 8% of children were obese in walkable areas with access to more healthy food.
^^Maybe you should, b/c mine is a peer-reviewed article and from an environmental health journal, and agrees with this peer-reviewed article I posted a while back:
City structure, obesity, and environmental justi... [Soc Sci Med. 2009] - PubMed - NCBI
***We find that, counter to predictions, subpopulations generally considered vulnerable to obesity (and environmental injustices more generally) are more likely to live in walkable neighborhoods and have better walking access to neighborhood parks than other groups in Phoenix. However, crime is highest in walkable neighborhoods with large Latino/a and African-American populations and parks are smaller in areas populated by Latino/as. Given the higher prevalence of obesity and related diseases in lower income and minority populations in Phoenix, the results suggest that benefits of built environments may be offset by social characteristics. Our most consistent finding indicates a strong negative relationship between the percentage of the population under 18 years of age living in an area and the likelihood that the structure of the built environment supports physical activity.
Yours, OTOH, is from a blog, and does reference a study which does not even mention the word "suburb".
Also from my link:
**Studies find that people who live close to parks are more likely to use them and to be physically active than those who live farther from them [13].
Interestingly, many cities do not have a lot of parks, and some on this board have argued against parks, trees, etc. Most burbs do have parks.
Some more:
**We propose that other factors of the urban built and physical environment may undermine the positive potential for being physically active in inner cities, even though urban form may, in principle, facilitate being active. We hypothesize that many factors of the environment in inner cities – including built, physical and social factors – may exert a net negative influence on the health of inner city residents and that it may be mediated in ways that are different or function differently from those in suburban neighborhoods. These factors and conditions include problem land use issues, such as waste sites; infrastructure maintenance and investment issues; and social realities, such as neighborhood crime, that can result in a neighborhood environment where outdoor exercise and recreation are risky or unappealing and are, thus, avoided (Table 1).
I will add, your study does not show the "exact opposite".
K,
From my own experience:
The Chinese who live in very dense and urban Hong Kong, are much fitter and less obese than Americans.
And Chinese who move to the US and live in suburbs are prone to obesity.
Whatever study you may want to show me will not mean more than my own powers of observation.
Can you explain these longevity figures, please:
Population longevities are increasing as life expectancies around the world grow:[3][4]
Spain: 79.08 years in 2002, 81.07 years in 2010
Australia: 80 years in 2002, 81.72 years in 2010
Italy: 79.25 years in 2002, 80.33 years in 2010
France: 79.05 years in 2002, 81.09 years in 2010
Germany: 77.78 years in 2002, 79.41 years in 2010
UK: 80 years in 2002, 81.73 years in 2010
USA: 77.4 years in 2002, 78.24 years in 2010
Monaco: 79.12 years in 2002, 89.73 years in 2011
Why is the US lagging.
BTW, I think no's 1,2,3 in the world are: Macau, Hong Kong, and Japan.
And the US is about number 40, despite its enormous spending on healthcare
I was referring his next link which mentioned "car-centric" not "suburbanites".
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