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House's Pro-Auto Budget Is A Big, Fat Mistake |
Current rating: 0 |
by Neal Peirce
(No verified email address) |
03 Sep 2003
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There's little doubt most Americans favor transportation choices. A nationwide poll last spring, for example, showed 53 percent favor increased federal spending on bicycle facilities -- new paths, reserved lanes, better signals -- even if it means that less collected in gas taxes goes to new road construction. |
The federal government's signature program to promote pedestrian and bikeway transportation alternatives ways to spare us a 100-percent asphalt future teeters on the edge of extinction in a U.S. House vote scheduled this week.
The House will have to decide whether to restore funding for the Transportation Enhancements program, a favorite of environmentalists and local communities, that its Appropriations Committee left unfunded in favor of still more billions for standard highway projects.
Ironically, the moment of decision follows release of major new research scientifically linking, for the first time ever, the United States' pattern of sprawling, road-dependent, development with the alarming epidemic of rising weight and obesity that the country has been experiencing.
The peer-reviewed study, published in the American Journal of Health Promotion and the American Journal of Public Health, relies on federal census figures and health data based on 200,000 Americans living in 448 metropolitan area counties. Its finding: Americans who live in spread-out, totally auto-dependent communities routinely walk less, weigh more (an average of 6 pounds), and are more prone to high blood pressure than residents of the most densely populated places.
A less-noticed, companion piece of research, published simultaneously by the American Journal of Public Health, suggests there is a public-policy solution to the dilemma of spread-out development that makes us ever more auto-reliant, sedentary, fatter and unfit.
Tested for several decades in Europe, the alternative stresses serious government investments in expanded walkways and bikeways, making intersections safer for pedestrians, establishing physical barriers to fast city and town auto traffic and planning villages and communities friendly to pedestrians.
The Dutch more than doubled their already massive network of bike paths and lanes between the '70s and '90s, while the Germans almost tripled the extent of their bikeway network. Almost all paths were connected with practical destinations for everyday travel town centers, schools, parks, office complexes, light-rail stops rather than the recreation attractions most popular for bike paths in the U.S.
Companion traffic-calming measures first reported in this column from Delft, Netherlands, in 1978 feature zigzag curves, speed bumps and artificial dead ends that give pedestrians, cyclists and playing children as much use of residential streets as motor vehicles.
The results, report John Pucher of Rutgers University and Lewis Dijkstra of the European Commission in Brussels, are spectacular. With a more-hospitable environment for non-auto travel, walking and cycling account for 34 percent of urban trips in Germany, 46 percent in the Netherlands. By contrast, only 10 percent of Americans used foot or bike for urban trips in the '70s, and by 1995 the figure was down to a mere 6 percent. Even Canada now registers almost twice our number of walking and biking trips.
Walking and cycling have yielded the Europeans the health results you'd expect much lower rates of obesity, diabetes and hypertension than the United States. With those come healthy life expectancies 2.5 to 4.4 years longer than the United States, even though European per capita health expenditures are only half ours.
With U.S. obesity levels rising rapidly and our gigantic baby-boom generation soon to reach its retirement years, sensible federal policy would be to emulate the European practices and make walking, cycling and transit options at least the equal of outlays for standard roads and bridges.
Instead, the Republican majority on the House Appropriations Committee wants to decapitate the enhancements program, which amounts to just 10 percent of federal transportation funding anyway.
The decision clearly doesn't sit well with Democrats, who are almost unanimous for the enhancements. Nor, it turns out, with Rep. Tom Petri, R-Wis., chair of the Transportation subcommittee considering renewal of TEA-21, the country's basic transportation law, which expires Sept. 30. Petri warns that if enhancements are killed, the broad coalition of interests that now favor the entire TEA-21 renewal package may collapse.
There's little doubt most Americans favor transportation choices. A nationwide poll last spring, for example, showed 53 percent favor increased federal spending on bicycle facilities new paths, reserved lanes, better signals even if it means that less collected in gas taxes goes to new road construction.
Check Europe again and you see the massive potential payoff. We have hostile main arteries, fewer sidewalks and strip malls hazardous to unmotorized visitors. On a per-mile basis, an American pedestrian is three times more likely to get killed and a cyclist two times more likely to get killed than his German counterpart.
Provide safe environments and people's behavior does change. Germans and Dutch 75 and older, for example, make half their trips on foot or bike, compared with 6 percent of Americans 65 or older. Result: valuable physical exercise, independence, socializing, enhanced quality of life.
Please, Congress, think again!
Copyright © 2003 Seattle Times Company
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/ |
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U.S. Pedestrians, Cyclists Tempting Fate -- Or Worse |
by Amanda Gardner
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
03 Sep 2003
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FRIDAY, Aug. 29 (HealthDayNews) -- John Pucher is something of an oddity in New Jersey.
He walks to work, to the grocery store, to the bank, to the video store (the movie theater is too far on foot). For the past 25 years, he has averaged eight to 10 miles a day. He doesn't own a car and hasn't for the last three decades.
Pucher has also never been injured while walking, although "there have been some very scary close calls."
It is perhaps surprising that Pucher has remained unscathed in all his years of walking, especially in light of statistics he compiled for a paper appearing in the September issue of the American Journal of Public Health.
Pucher and Lewis Dijkstra of the European Commission in Brussels found that cyclists and pedestrians in the United States were two to six times more likely to be killed than their German or Dutch counterparts. Per kilometer traveled, U.S. pedestrians were 23 times more likely to get killed than the occupants of a car, while bicyclists were 12 times more likely to be killed.
In the United States in 2000, 662,000 bicyclists and 191,000 pedestrians ended up in emergency rooms. And 740 of those cyclists and 4,598 pedestrians died.
"The main point of the article is that it is much, much more dangerous here in the United States to walk and cycle than it is in Europe," says Pucher, a professor of urban planning and transportation at Rutgers University in New Jersey. "The conclusion was that there are a lot of things we could do to make walking and cycling safer."
"The results are shocking," says Michael Greenberg, associate editor of the American Journal of Public Health, and an associate dean at Rutgers.
Americans, who are suffering from an unprecedented obesity epidemic, tend to drive to a destination even though 41 percent of all trips in 2001 were shorter than two miles and 28 percent were less than one mile. While walking and cycling account for less than one-tenth of all urban trips in the United States, they account for one-third of all such trips in Germany and for half the trips in the Netherlands.
And as more Europeans have embraced bicycling and walking, the activities have become safer, with fatalities declining since the mid-1970s.
Not coincidentally, Europeans are also thinner and fitter than their highway-happy American counterparts, with lower rates of obesity, diabetes and hypertension.
What can be done about what the authors call the "appallingly unsafe, unpleasant, and inconvenient conditions faced by pedestrians and bicyclists in most American cities"? A few European-style adjustments, all of them eminently doable, might persuade Americans to leave their cars in the garage more often.
"We could have better sidewalks, auto-free zones, more bike paths," Pucher says. "We could have walking and cycling education programs in the schools. We could introduce driver training programs that make the motorist more sensitive to the dangers involved."
Other options already available in Europe include "traffic calming" of residential neighborhoods (such as speed bumps and curves); extensive auto-free zones in city centers; the introduction of "bicycle streets" where cyclists have the right of way over cars; bike systems that serve practical destinations, not just recreational attractions; and better enforcement of traffic regulations.
But don't wait for the United States to catch up with Europe before you start walking and pedaling. One study found the health benefits from cycling exceeded the risks 10-to-1. Even though it's far more dangerous to bike or walk in the United States, the probability of getting killed is still exceedingly low.
Copyright © 2003 HealthDay. All rights reserved
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