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Professor Richard Jackson: How our built environment makes us fat, sick, depressed, and contributes to global warming—and what to do about it.

What's good for the planet is good for our children, pediatrician and adjunct Professor of City and Regional Planning Richard Jackson told students and staff from the Traffic Safety Center during a February seminar.

Jackson believes the destruction of walkable neighborhoods and their replacement with housing developments far from city centers, the loss of neighborhood schools, ever-larger single-family houses, and the lack of sidewalks have all contributed to a range of ills, from obesity and diabetes, to traffic injuries, asthma and depression.

The increased reliance on automobiles affects human health in other ways, as well: air pollution and the creation of greenhouse gases, the run-off of oil and other chemicals into the water supply, and heat-producing parking lots.

"Sprawlburbia," as he calls it, has led to a "syndemic"—a multitude of interwoven epidemics.

To make his point, Jackson produced a variety of disparate but related statistics:

• Fifteen percent of Americans were classified as obese in 1978 compared to 31 percent in 2002.

The average American is 10 pounds heavier than 10 years ago. To compensate for this extra weight, airlines expend an extra billion dollars each year for jet fuel.

• Bariatric surgery, better known as "stomach stapling," has become the most rapidly increasing type of surgery in adults and children. This type of surgery has tripled in Californiain the past four years.
• In 1976, 66 percent of kids in the U.S. walked to school compared to only 13 percent in 2000.
• In 1982, the average size of the average new American house was 1,500 square feet. By 2002 it had grown to 2,300.
• California lost 500 farms and 300,000 acres of farmland to development in 2005.
• The average number of vehicle miles traveled per person in 1960 in the U.S. was 4,000, compared to 10,000 in 2002.
• The amount of oil that runs off U.S. roads and parking lots into the ocean every eight months equals the amount spilled by the Exxon Valdez.
• In Atlanta, where Jackson worked at the Centers for Disease Control, motorists were restricted from driving during peak morning rush hours in the downtown area for the 17 days of the 1996 summer Olympics. The improvement in air quality also produced a significant drop—nearly 30 percent—in the number of children seen in clinics for acute asthma during the same period of time.

What all these statistics point to, says Jackson, is the important role transportation and housing play in the physical and mental health of Americans.

"Decisions about transportation, housing, and the environment all have an impact on public health," he said, adding that a lack of political leadership has produced conditions that may mean today’s children may be the first generation in American history not to live as long as their parents.

The solution to many of these problems, Jackson suggested, is to get Americans walking again. But people cannot walk where distances are too great, where there are no sidewalks, where there are no trees to provide shade on hot, summer days.

"We must change the built environment to support people making healthier choices," he said. He pointed out that transit-oriented neighborhoods generate 120 percent more pedestrian and bicycle trips than neighborhoods that are car-oriented.

Exercise and weight loss are the best way to prevent Type 2 diabetes. "For people with diabetes, walking as an exercise for just two hours per week reduced their death rate by nearly 40 percent."

Similarly, exercise and socializing are the best non-drug approaches for alleviating depression, he said, but today’s homes with their entertainment centers mean too many people live their lives as couch potatoes in isolation.

Solutions include a return to neighborhood schools, which would allow children to walk to schools; homes built with second floor balconies looking out on streets, which would make streets safer; requiring insurance companies to support preventative exercise; and recognizing the importance of local gathering spots so people would not be isolated in large houses.

If you have a traffic safety-related research project you'd like to present at one of this season's seminars, or you'd like more information or materials on a previous seminar, please contact us.