In an excerpt from his book Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design, Charles Montgomery examines how road design affects our waistlines:
Consider Atlanta. The average working adult in Atlanta’s suburbs now drives 44 miles a day. (That’s 72 minutes a day behind the wheel, just getting to work and back.) Ninety-four percent of Atlantans commute by car. They spend more on gas than anyone else in the country. In a study of more than 8,000 households, investigators from the Georgia Institute of Technology led by Lawrence Frank discovered that people’s environments were shaping their travel behavior and their bodies. They could actually predict how fat people were by where they lived in the city. Frank found that a white male living in Midtown, a lively district near Atlanta’s downtown, was likely to weigh 10 pounds less than his identical twin living out in a place like, say, Mableton, in the cul-de-sac archipelago that surrounds Atlanta, simply because the Midtowner would be twice as likely to get enough exercise every day.
Here’s how their neighborhoods engineer their travel behavior:
Midtown was laid out long before the dispersalists got their hands on the city. It exhibits the convenient geometry of the streetcar neighborhood even though its streetcars disappeared in 1949. Housing, offices, and retail space are all sprinkled relatively close together on a latticelike street grid. A quart of milk or a bar or a downtown-bound bus are never more than a few blocks away. It is easy for people to walk to shops, services, or MARTA, the city’s limited rapid transit system, so that’s what they do.
But in suburbs like Mableton, residential lots are huge, roads are wide and meandering, and stores are typically concentrated in faraway shopping plazas surrounded by parking lots. Six out of every 10 Atlantans told Frank’s team that they couldn’t walk to nearby shops and services or to a public bus stop. Road geometry was partly to blame. Frank and others have found that that iconic suburban innovation—the cul-de-sac—has become part of a backfiring behavioral system.
Update from a reader:
I think it’s a bit of a jump of logic for Charles Montgomery to suggest that longer commutes and suburban-style road design affect our waistlines. Sure, the white male living in Midtown Atlanta is likely to be 10 pounds lighter than his counterpart in Mableton, but is that because of walking habits, or self-selection? That white male living in Midtown (Atlanta’s gay neighborhood, mind you) is also more likely to go to the gym, eat kale salads from Whole Foods, bike around town, and take extra pains to care about his appearance. The white male living in Midtown is, probably, single and urban-minded, while the white male living in suburbia is almost certainly married with kids. I don’t know Montgomery’s methodology, but there are a whole host of factors here other than road design. The kinds of white males who choose to live in a vibrant, diverse and hip urban neighborhood are the kinds of white males who – to paint with very broad strokes – take care of their bodies, for reasons of vanity or health.
In any event, I defy you to find a gay neighborhood in the USA that isn’t remarkably fit compared to its suburban counterparts – to the consternation, I expect, of any number of gays who don’t really want to go to the gym every day, but have to keep up with the Joneses.
The Dish 