Walker in the Dell
Tuesday, October 23, 2007 from The Columbian
BY MICHAEL ANDERSEN, Columbian staff writer
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Is your city council making you fat?
Walking to the store, playing outside, taking up jogging - they might seem like private choices. Mark Fenton begs to differ, and some local leaders are listening.
Make all the resolutions you want, the former Walking Magazine editor says. If your neighborhood doesn't have grass on both sides of the sidewalk, neighborhood shops and grid-style streets, you're not likely to integrate physical activity into your daily life, Fenton claims.
Fenton is headlining a sold-out forum today at Firstenburg Community Center in Vancouver, sponsored by the healthy-living nonprofit Community Choices 2010, at which local leaders and the public will talk about the big new thing in urban planning: walkability.
The Columbian tracked Fenton down Monday to talk about staying trim, and the future of the suburbs.
Eight years ago, Walking Magazine named Vancouver one of the country's top 10 "walking cities." Are you sure you guys had the right Vancouver?
We wanted some smalls, some mediums and some larges. The larges were the usual suspects - New York, Boston, Washington, D.C. Somebody writes to us and says, 'We're doing some really cool stuff on our waterfront.' We gave them a nod. It was part of an intent to recognize places making an honest effort.
You've also been a Reebok engineer and a race-walking coach. What brought you into pedestrian evangelism?
It wasn't as intriguing to me to work with elite athletes. You're not really helping lots of people. The important thing is not to get the elite athlete to take a minute off his marathon. Much more important is to get most Americans off their couch at all.
The question is not: "Is exercise good for us? How much exercise is good for us?" Those are not the hard questions. We know those. What I got sucked into is: "How do we get people to actually do it?"
And your argument is that the way to get ourselves to exercise is to design neighborhoods for pedestrians as well as cars. So I should forget about Weight Watchers?
No! Do Weight Watchers. Join your YWCA. But if I leave your neighborhood crummy for physical activity, those behavior changes will never stick. You'll do it for a while - and there's data to show this - but if I leave you with a challenging environment, you'll regress to your earlier habits.
What's the most walkable suburb you've seen?
Oh, man, that's a tough one. If I use my definition of suburb, they aren't walkable. Within my subdivision, I might have sidewalks, and my child's friend may only be a half-mile away as the crow flies, but to get there we may have to snake our way out of a housing subdivision onto an arterial road. By the time he's made his way into the next subdivision over, he's had to walk two miles.
Aren't any suburbs changing that model?
Naperville, Ill., is kind of a small town outside Chicago. What they're doing is trying to emulate the good part of town as they grow. They're saying, "When the next subdivision is built, let's put it on a grid. Let's put little clusters of stores out in the neighborhoods."
Your ancestors spent a million years looking for ways to be lazier. Now you're essentially an advocate for unnecessary work.
It is necessary work. The unintended consequences of an automobile-only transportation system do not stop at the lack of physical activity.
We know about the environmental ones. What about the other prices we pay for this system? What about the disintegration of city centers? We don't go to the corner store anymore. We don't go and see our neighbors. Cops tell us the single thing we want the most to keep crime off the streets is to keep more eyes on the street. [And] yeah, there's this public health benefit. We're trying to make up for the fact that we're no longer hunter-gatherers.
But biologically, aren't we still the same? Aren't our brains hard-wired for avoiding physical activity?
Yep, yep, absolutely. I call it the million-year problem. We grew up as a species with food being scarce and physical activity being plentiful, and now we've exactly reversed those.
So if my kids don't play outside, are they on the road to misery?
They are, sadly. There are some really scary things about their social environment. Playing outside when I was growing up, I was stepping into a milieu of activity that was safe for me. Now, you're sending this child into this barren landscape. The greater risk is not that there are more weirdos out there, but that there are fewer regular people out there.
What's the biggest sacrifice Clark County residents would need to make if they want a more walkable community?
Here's the deal: I think they would have to be willing to live a life outside their car. Not without a car, but just a life outside the car. For many people, I think that feels like a sacrifice. I would go on to argue that that's not a sacrifice at all once they get out there, but they don't know it.
