Louisiana Municipal Review

Louisiana Municipal Foundation publication
November 2009
Author: Patrick Moore
Article Text:

The New Case for Bike paths: Community Health and the Built Environment

How much does your city’s built environment contribute to the health of your citizens? It’s a question asked frequently as local leaders recognize the connection between planning and public health. Sidewalks, parks, and bike paths are no longer considered superfluous. They are seen as having real impact on the well-being and productivity of citizens, and on the image and the economic strength of communities.

The connection between planning and public health has been slowly building steam. In fact, an analysis of the built environment is emerging as an indicator in public health scorecards. The Pennington Biomedical Research Center’s “Louisiana’s Report Card on Physical Activity and Health for Children and Youth,” released in September, is one. The state earned an overall grade of D, and we performed especially poorly in “built environment and community design.”

The report found that in Louisiana 38 percent of young people live in neighborhoods without sidewalks or walking paths, and that children who lived below the poverty level had less access than others to parks and playgrounds. It also revealed that only half of the state’s high-school students attended physical education classes five days a week, and that only six percent of them biked or walked to school.

These factors and others have contributed to a grim statistic: One-third of Louisiana adolescents are overweight or obese. Many will remain in this category as adults, and will be more likely to acquire preventable diseases like Type II diabetes, heart disease, and some forms of cancer.

Transforming our communities into places that facilitate better health won’t happen overnight, but taking small steps now can move us forward. As you consider public projects like placement of parks, updates to recreational facilities, community master plans, and land use plans, do so with an eye toward health and wellness. You might:

• Invite the public health community to educate city planners about local health statistics. Such discussions can create strong information exchanges and help your team make informed decisions about how planning can help curb top health issues.

• Consider a Health Impact Assessment (HIA), a tool growing in popularity nationwide which helps cities and towns benchmark the built environment’s impact on public health. Another helpful tool is the recently released “Louisiana Human Development Report,” which evaluates the quality of life of everyday people in our communities. See www.measureofamerica.org to examine how your parish is faring.

• Begin to map parks and recreational facilities in relation to income level. Very often, a community’s best parks are located in affluent neighborhoods, while those in low-income neighborhoods have languished. This trend is partly due to the belief that parks attract illegal behavior. However, developing young people who live in high-crime areas need positive outlets, and we know that design elements, like lighting and placement of parking lots, can improve safety significantly and ensure parents participate.

• Focus on an infill approach to older neighborhoods. Density means savings to the municipality, which can free up funds to improve parks and install sidewalks in these areas over the long term.

• Encourage developers to implement amenities that facilitate exercise, including sidewalks, peripheral paths, or walking trails. Pennington researchers have found that people benefit significantly from exercise in smaller increments, including three 10-minute walks a day. In the past, the examination of public health has fallen to public health experts, but the issues are so pervasive that we need an all-handson- deck approach. When municipalities begin to integrate health goals into the built environment, we will start to move the needle.