Earlier this week I chanced upon the walkscore website, which ranks the walkability of hundreds of United States neighborhoods by calculating the average distances between homes and basic services to determine their ease of accessibility to people on foot. From the site:

Picture a walkable neighborhood. You lose weight each time you walk to the grocery store. You stumble home from last call without waiting for a cab. You spend less money on your car—or you don’t own a car. When you shop, you support your local economy. You talk to your neighbors.

What makes a neighborhood walkable?

• A center: Walkable neighborhoods have a discernable center, whether it’s a shopping district, a main street, or a public space.
• Density: The neighborhood is compact enough for local businesses to flourish and for public transportation to run frequently.
• Mixed income, mixed use: Housing is provided for everyone who works in the neighborhood: young and old, singles and families, rich and poor. Businesses and residences are located near each other.
• Parks and public space: There are plenty of public places to gather and play.
• Pedestrian-centric design: Buildings are placed close to the street to cater to foot traffic, with parking lots relegated to the back.
• Nearby schools and workplaces: Schools and workplaces are close enough that most residents can walk from their homes.

Streets Designed for Everyone

Complete Streets are roads are designed for everyone who uses them, including bicyclists, pedestrians of all ages and abilities, and people getting on and off transit vehicles. These streets are:

• Accessible: There are wheelchair ramps, plenty of benches with shade, sidewalks on all streets, etc.
• Well-connected: Streets form a connected grid that improves traffic by providing many routes to any destination.
• Built for the right speed: Lanes are narrow or traffic calming is in place to control speed.
• Comfortable: Pedestrian medians at intersections, count-down crosswalk timers, bicycle lanes, protected bus shelters, etc. make the street work better for those outside of a car.

It’s a beautifully simple concept, and one that’s at the heart of current land use planning and public health efforts. In our car-centered culture, “walkability” has become an elusive (and so desirable and increasingly marketable) quality. It’s something our ancestors took for granted: ready, car-free access to life’s amenities, with an intangible boost to quality of life (related to exercise, knowing your neighbors and the makings of a desirable “place”)  thrown in.

As detailed in many recent studies, many of the same land use principles that support environmental health also often support improved public health. Some of the greatest public health challenges of our time  - obesity and respiratory illness - have been traced to inactivity and poor diet, which, in turn, appear to result from living and working in places that are car-centered and do not encourage (or actively discourage) individual physical activity and healthy food choices. It is hard to log 10,000 steps per day on a pedometer if you spend all your spare time driving to and from work, school and a big box shopping center. Walkable neighborhoods improve the well-being of those who live in them by reducing the circumstances that lead to  problems like obesity and respiratory illness.

The environmental benefits of  “smart growth” practices include improved air quality, reduced carbon emissions,  and a reduced physical development “footprint” that encourages people to leave behind suburban sprawl and car travel. Further benefits to wildlife habitat and water quality result from the creation of regional parks and trail systems that reduce impermeable surfaces and provide adequate space for natural areas and catchment/filtration of stormwater runoff. Those regional parks are more affordable to developers when residential lots are more densely placed.

Local governments and public health officials are beginning to understand that land use planning tools can solve two problems at once by reducing environmental  ills and improving public health. The Congress for New Urbanism (which will hold its annual conference in Denver in 2009) has long advocated for this model -  looking to patterns of pre-industrial European cities, and older US “streetcar” neighborhoods for inspiration. A New Yorker magazine article several years ago described New York City as the Greenest City in America because of the qualities that make it hard to drive there: it is densely developed, transit-oriented, and “mixed-use” (combining residential, commercial and retail uses in the same area) an idea that fell out of favor in many mid-century U.S. zoning codes .

The fact that “sustainability” and public health professionals have reached the same conclusions about desirable land use types is helping to produce new coalitions, as both groups seek to influence local zoning, planning and economic development guidelines. The “Healthy Communities” movement of the 1990s, forged in part by hospitals working with community leaders, is increasingly moving toward creating healthy places, or “livable communities“ and that has public policy makers trying to understand how to measure the extent to which gross-level land use decisions can or should be driven by public health goals and indicators.

Examples in Colorado include:

The redevelopment of the 4700 acre former Stapleton Airport site was the Denver region’s first major “new urbanist” project in the mid-1990s to explicitly emphasize sustainable development principles in its master plan. It was the first major project in Denver to embrace the now-common goal of “urban villages”, with dense multi-use development augmented by ready access to transit and large and plentiful regional parks and trails. Once Stapleton redevelopment was underway, its potential to support improved public health attracted funding by the national Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and others to bolster programs for active living, including incentives and information to encourage transit use, biking and walking.

The Denver Safe Routes to School and national walking school bus efforts seek to get kids walking and biking to school together.

The  Metro Denver Health and Wellness Coalition seeks to make the Denver region the healthiest in the country through a combined approach, including an emphasis on locally produced food in schools, and increased urban mobility.

Humana recently provided major sponsorship for the Freewheelin bicycle kiosks at the Democratic National Convention in Denver and the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, MN.

And, last but not least, Kaiser Permanente is partnering withThe Colorado Health Foundation and The Colorado Physical Activity and Nutrition (COPAN) Program to sponsor LiveWell Colorado - a statewide effort to increase public nutrition, mobility and fitness in the interest of public health.

So far, the land use-public health connection with all of these programs is more implicit than explicit.

Some questions raised:

• Does walkability translate into higher real estate values, all else being held equal?
• Are suburbs bad for your health?
• Is just living in a well-designed community enough to change your lifestyle?
• Does it help to live in a pedestrian friendly community if you must commute by car to your job every day?
• How much social engineering are we willing to support, or will the market be sufficient to drive the land use changes sought by environmental and public health advocates?

I welcome your comments!