Archive for the 'Health' Category

Bicycling and walking make up 12 percent of all trips and 14 percent of all traffic fatalities and yet receive only 1.6 percent of federal transportation funding. What more do you need to make the case for investments in bicycling and walking? Well, if you think of something it is probably covered in Bicycling and Walking in the United States: 2012 Benchmarking Report released today by the Alliance for Biking and Walking.

Here are some of the highlights

• In 2009, 40% of trips in the United States were shorter than 2 miles, yet 87% of these trips are by car. Twenty-seven percent of trips were shorter than 1 mile. Still, Americans use their cars for 62% of these trips.

• While bicycling and walking fell 66% between 1960 and 2009, obesity levels increased 156%.

• Seniors are the most vulnerable bicyclists and pedestrians. Adults over 65 make up 10% of walking trips, yet comprise 19% of pedestrian fatalities. This age group accounts for 6% of bicycling trips, yet 10% of bicyclist fatalities.

• Bicycling and walking projects create 11-14 jobs per $1 million spent, compared to just 7 jobs created per $1 million spent on highway projects. Cost benefit analysis show that up to $11.80 in benefits can be gained for every $1 invested in bicycling and walking.

• On average, the largest 51 U.S. cities show a 29% increase in bicycle facilities since the 2010 report. Cities report that 20,908 miles of bicycle facilities and 7,079 miles of pedestrian facilities are planned for the coming years (much of this contingent upon funding).

Darren Flusche
League Policy Analyst

Flusche joined the League in April 2009 and has a B.A. in history from Syracuse University and a Masters of Public Administration with a concentration in public policy analysis from New York University.

Last week in Washington started on a high – and not just the sugar high generated by Halloween candy. We opened registration for the 2012 National Bike Summit. The Summit is a huge deal for us; a lot of work to pull together, but incredibly rewarding to see the growing impact it has each year on our issues and our movement. Clearly, the 2012 edition is going to be as critical as any previous events coming as it does just eight days before the current transportation bill expires.

Our excitement is obviously shared: folks in Arkansas and Oklahoma were proudly telling me later in the week that they had signed up already and even knew what number registrant they were!

Tuesday was a face-to-face America Bikes board meeting…and of course it was also the day of the remarkable Senate vote on Rand Paul’s amendment to strip the transportation enhancements program of all its funding and divert those dollars to bridge repair. Thanks to a massive outpouring of e-mails and calls from tens of thousands of supporters, the amendment was voted down by 60 to 38. We learned the result during the America Bikes board meeting, and it was an exciting moment. Sixty votes in the Senate is actually a pretty big deal. That’s a veto-proof majority and not many issues have garnered that kind of bi-partisan support in this most divided Congress.  Yes, Republicans, Democrats and Independents voted together to unequivocally support the continuation of the TE program.

The following day, as if more validation were needed, a huge report was released by the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Researchers found that:

Cutting out short auto trips and replacing them with mass transit and active transport would yield major health benefits, according to a study just published in the scientific journal Environmental Health Perspectives. The biggest health benefit was due to replacing half of the short trips with bicycle trips during the warmest six months of the year, saving about $3.8 billion per year from avoided mortality and reduced health care costs for conditions like obesity and heart disease.

Wow, that’s just what the enhancements and safe routes to schools programs could help make happen, right?  You betcha. So, thank you, Senators, for having the wisdom to maintain funding for such a valuable program with long-term financial benefits to individuals, communities and the nation. Remember, the total amount of Federal funding going to bicycling and walking projects in FY2011 was around $750 million…so $3.8 billion annually in returns is a pretty good investment by anyone’s standards!

Thursday morning I was traveling and picked up a copy of USA Today. The cover story was a new AAA research report on the phenomenal cost of motor vehicle crashes – $6m for every one of the more than 35,000 fatalities in 2009. Two interesting things beyond the staggering overall costs involved: first, the cost and impacts of crashes far outweigh those caused by congestion, which suggests safety should be higher priority than congestion relief for highway departments. Second, the study compared the relative costs of crashes per capita in different sized cities and showed low and high ranges. Lo and behold, all of the low-end communities – where crashes were the lowest – were Bicycle Friendly Communities of note:  San Francisco (gold), Colorado Springs (silver) and Boulder (platinum).  Coincidence?  I don’t think so.

There is tremendous bi-partisan support for encouraging bicycling and walking as part of Federal transportation program. There are incredible health and environmental benefits to be had from such an investment. And in those places that are investing in making non-motorized transportation work, every resident is benefitting in terms of safety and quality of life, whether they bicycle or not.

Could the week possibly get any better? 

Well, late on Friday, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee released their 600-page draft of the next Federal transportation bill. For now, you can look at the bill yourself (enjoy…it is only 600 pages after all), and review this side-by-side analysis of the critical funding sections for bicycling and walking programs and decide for yourself what impact this might have on funding for those activities. We’ll provide more commentary on Tuesday, ahead of the Committee mark-up on Wednesday – then you’ll discover whether the high’s of the week continued, or the scary part of Halloween came to the fore…

Andy Clarke
League President

Clarke was appointed to the position of Executive Director in April of 2004 after successfully leading efforts to create, interpret and implement the various transportation programs that are available to improve conditions for bicycling and walking as the League’s State and Local Advocacy Director.

Almost every day we get fresh confirmation that getting more people on bikes is a good idea, and that the kinds of things we’ve been advocating for years are actually effective and useful. So in the immortal words of the Ian Dury and the Blockheads song, we’ve got reasons to be cheerful…and of Tim Blumenthal, “when people ride bikes, great things happen.”

Today we learned that the percentage of major employers offering financial incentives to their employees to engage in health and wellness programs increase from 57% in 2009 to 62% in 2010 and the average value of that cash incentive rose to $430 per person. 56% of employers found these programs to have a better than expected impact on participation!

A couple of days ago, Science Daily reported on a study that shows exercising outdoors makes people feel better than indoors: “ compared with exercising indoors, exercising in natural environments was associated with greater feelings of revitalisation, increased energy and positive engagement, together with decreases in tension, confusion, anger and depression. Participants also reported greater enjoyment and satisfaction with outdoor activity and stated that they were more likely to repeat the activity at a later date.

Last month, corporate leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos confirmed that these issues are receiving attention at the highest levels. Two dozen global companies have created  a Workplace Wellness Alliance and are reporting “Return on investment of workplace health has been demonstrated to be as high as 4 US dollars per 1 dollar spent, contributing not only to increased productivity but also to better health in the general population with the workplace as an entry point for prevention at community level.”

Obviously the need for this exercise is more compelling than ever. We continue to get fatter at an alarming rate – not just in the US but worldwide, according to the latest numbers reported in the Lancet: “In 2008, an estimated 1.46 billion adults worldwide had a BMI of 25 kg/m2 or higher, including 502 million who were obese. During the study period, the age-standardized prevalence of obesity increased dramatically in both men (from 4.8% to 9.8%) and women (from 7.9% to 13.8%)”. And we learned that lifestyle, not genetics, is the stronger indicator of longevity and childhood obesity.

So the need for bicycling is there and the corporate world is clearly realizing the benefits of wellness to their bottom line. We’re just about to enter the review phase for the latest round of Bicycle Friendly Business applications; it will be interesting to see if bicycling is featuring more in their collective definition of what constitutes “wellness” programming. Earlier this week Darren wrote about the Minneapolis “safety in numbers” report, which adds to the body of knowledge that suggests that getting more people to ride is not only NOT a dangerous thing to be doing, but actually improves the overall level of safety for everyone riding. So come on corporate America…let’s get people riding!

Andy Clarke
League President

Clarke was appointed to the position of Executive Director in April of 2004 after successfully leading efforts to create, interpret and implement the various transportation programs that are available to improve conditions for bicycling and walking as the League’s State and Local Advocacy Director.

The New Year is bringing with it a host of new research and reports. This is the first of a series of research summaries.

According to a survey recently released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 57 percent of adult Americans say that their neighborhood features – like sidewalks, crosswalks, or lighting – are of high importance in determining their levels of physical activity.  About two-thirds of adults said they were willing to take “civic actions” to improve neighborhood features.

The report, “Public Support for Street-Scale Urban Design Practices and Policies to Increase Physical Activity,” confirms that the public sees the impact the built environment has on their levels of physical activity. There were no statistically significant differences in the responses to the impact question based on income, sex, education, home ownership, or BMI; however, respondents over 65 years old, African-Americans and Hispanics were more likely than others to say that neighborhood features impact their levels of activity. [UPDATE: StreetsBlog Capitol Hill has a very good piece on building a diverse advocacy movement.]

The survey also shows that many people are willing to take action to push for such projects. What were they willing to do? More than 40 percent were willing to write letters. This is not surprising for those of us that see the great response rate for important biking and walking advocacy alerts. Sixteen percent were willing to pay more in taxes. Six percent were willing to write letters AND pay more in taxes.

Not surprisingly, the study concludes, “the biggest factor in determining a person’s willingness to take civic action to improve neighborhood features was how important that person rated neighborhood features to be in determining her or his level of physical activity.”

More information on health and the built environment:

• Active Living By Design
• Active Living Research
• The Community Guide: Promoting Physical Activity: Environmental and Policy Approaches
• Designing and Building Healthy Places
• CDC Physical Activity Topics
• State Indicator Report on Physical Activity 2010

Darren Flusche
League Policy Analyst

Flusche joined the League in April 2009 and has a B.A. in history from Syracuse University and a Masters of Public Administration with a concentration in public policy analysis from New York University.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) National Center for Statistics and Analysis has released new fatality data for 2009. While it’s still hard to fathom that more than 33,000 people were killed in our streets last year, the trend is in the right direction. The total number of traffic fatalities dropped 9.7% from 37,423 to 33,808. Cyclist fatalities dropped somewhat faster: a 12% decline from 718 in 2008 to 630 in 2009. One disappointment is that pedestrian fatalities declined at a slower rate than the others, lowering 7.3% from 4,414 to 4,092.

It’s encouraging that fatalities are down, but what was the cause? NHTSA published a table that includes a line for the fatality rate, showing fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles travels. This line shows that fatalities are down,  despite a slight increase in vehicle miles traveled, VMT. (This paragraph was edited to correct an earlier error.)

So, what about cyclists? Once again we run in data collection problems. While the DOT carefully estimates auto VMT, we are still stuck with feeble data on bicycling rates — and none have been released for 2009. Bicycle commuting jumped up in 2008. Was that a spike or did the trend continue into 2009? If the increase continued, then the fatality rate would have lowered and that would be good news. Stay tuned for the future release of the American Community Survey commuter data for 2009.

Injuries, based on estimates from the National Automotive Sampling System (NASS) General Estimates System (GES), declined for pedestrians to a statistically significant degree, but not for cyclists. So why are we seeing a decrease in cyclist fatalities but not in injuries?

Darren Flusche
League Policy Analyst

Flusche joined the League in April 2009 and has a B.A. in history from Syracuse University and a Masters of Public Administration with a concentration in public policy analysis from New York University.

One constant in policymaking, from the Progressive Era through the New Deal up to today, is the need to support policy proposals with data. Policymakers are expected to quantify the extent of a problem and measure the impacts of policy interventions. Just look at the curriculum of a public policy graduate program today and you will see that it is heavily weighted toward quantitative analysis. While this approach increases our knowledge and our ability to make informed decisions and generally leads to greater government accountability, it does present a challenge for bicycling given the current dearth of data collected on bicycling. (To give just one example of the feeble state on data on bicycling, bikes appear just twice in this 385 page catalogue of “transportation energy data.” Despite their limitations, the Census’ American Community Survey and the National Household Travel Survey remain the best sources on bicycling levels.)

For many of us, the health benefits of bicycling may seem self-evident. After all, traveling by foot and by bicycle requires a physical exertion not needed to drive a car.  However, for policy purposes these benefits need to quantified and demonstrated empirically. Researchers Pucher, Buehler, Bassett, and Dannenburg, recently released a study called “Walking and Cycling to Health: A comparative analysis of city, state, and international data,” which uses existing data on health and active transportation to show that higher rates of walking and biking are correlated with lower rates of self-reported obesity at the city, state, and country level. At the city level, active travel has a negative relationship with diabetes, meaning that cities with higher biking and walking rates have generally lower rates of diabetes.

For those interested in statistics, in both figures above, the solid line is the log regression line for the fifty states and the dashed line is the regression line for 47 of the 50 largest cities. The direction of line shows the inverse relationship between biking and walking (the x-axis in both figures) and obesity (the y-axis in the top figure) and diabetes rates (the y-axis in the bottom figure). The relationship is statistically significant at p<0.001 for cities and states for obesity and for states in diabetes. The relationship is significant at p<0.01 for cities for diabetes.

The results effectively show the direction of the relationship. Cities and states with higher levels of biking and walking have lower levels of obesity and diabetes. This may be enough to encourage communities to promote walking and biking. However, the data constraints limit the conclusions that can be drawn from this particular study. First, the data are cross-sectional, a snapshot of one moment, and therefore they cannot tell us anything about change over time. Secondly, the data are aggregated, which means that they speak to population-wide characteristics, not individual results. Third, data were not available to account for other factors that may have contributed to biking and walking levels and health status. For example, they did not take into account diet or family medical history. Finally, even if such data had been available, the relatively small sample sizes would have made it difficult to get statistically significant results if they had added control variables . These data limitations reinforce the need for better data collection.

In a related study, “Evaluating Public Transportation Health Benefits,” Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute reports on the health benefits of living in transit-oriented and mixed used neighborhoods. Litman finds that high quality public transportation and walkable and bikable mixed-use communities located around transit stations reduce traffic crashes and pollution emissions, increase physical fitness, improve mental health, improve basic access to medical care and healthy food and increase affordability.

Darren Flusche
League Policy Analyst

Flusche joined the League in April 2009 and has a B.A. in history from Syracuse University and a Masters of Public Administration with a concentration in public policy analysis from New York University.

We don’t always get a lot of national and international media coverage for local bike events, so I have to say it was a pretty amazing sight riding up Pennsylvania Avenue Monday morning and seeing a wall of media people wielding cameras, microphones, even some notepads…apparently in the median and across the bike lanes! The combination of European royal-watchers, sports reporters, and a couple of political hacks each headed for their respective targets (the Crown Prince of Denmark, Caron Butler, and Congressmen Oberstar and Petri respectively) as we rode up to the intersection at Freedom Plaza.

The Associated Press story that followed (and was picked up in a lot of places) included a rather unnecessary jibe about a passing motorist complaining that the event was holding up traffic as people were trying to get to work. That was pretty ironic given that we deliberately started the ride at 9:30am to avoid rush hour, stayed resolutely in the bike lanes (which are still within the temporary orange traffic cones) all the way up Pennsylvania Ave., and didn’t spill over into the travel lanes even when we stopped for the wall of media at 13th Street. In fact, the only people who might have been in the way of traffic were…the media. And we had specifically asked them to gather in Freedom Plaza and not in the middle of the street!

Besides, if you are still trying to get to work and it’s already 9:45am…I think you should be blaming your alarm clock, or the traffic you got stuck in on the Beltway or the illegally parked tour buses and taxis on Penn. Ave., rather than a couple of dozen people in the wide median of a six lane roadway!

Another miserable piece of journalism from the DriveOn blog at USA Today used the ride to regurgitate misinformation about the bike lanes from AAA Mid Atlantic and the always civic-minded D.C. cab driver corps who are irritated that the bike lanes will prevent them from making illegal and dangerous u-turns – or at least make them more difficult. The facts about the bike lanes are that with the proper enforcement of cabs and tour buses who currently illegally park, double-park, pick-up and discharge passengers along Pennsylvania Ave., there is no degradation of service to motorists using the reconfigured street. Of course, that doesn’t make such good copy as an imaginary “war on drivers” that the USA Today writer so enthusiastically perpetuates.

After we left Freedom Plaza, the ride around the Monumental Core of Washington DC was a real treat – the weather was perfect, and taking in the sites by bike was an ideal way to go.

Visit our Flickr page for more photos.

Andy Clarke
League President

Clarke was appointed to the position of Executive Director in April of 2004 after successfully leading efforts to create, interpret and implement the various transportation programs that are available to improve conditions for bicycling and walking as the League’s State and Local Advocacy Director.

The League, along with its partners in the America Bikes Coalition, would like to thank Senators Kerry (D-MA) and Lieberman (I-CT) on the introduction of the American Power Act. We are excited that they have included policy necessary to lay the foundation to make significant advances in addressing the impact of transportation on our climate, energy dependence and mobility. Riding bikes means cleaner air, and the more infrastructure available for bicyclists – the more people will ride!

We support the policy reforms included in the bill because they direct states and regions to spend federal transportation dollars received from the climate bill to build sustainable transportation solutions. The three avenues for funding – Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grants, (see how Tiger Grants fund bicycling ) the Transportation Efficiency grants, and the Highway Trust Fund with a green screen – give state and local governments several options to invest in low- and no-carbon transportation.

Once again, we thank you for your leadership on the American Power Act and the important policy
gains toward sustainable transportation. We urge you to increase the revenue returning to the
transportation sector, and index that investment to the price of carbon. Click here to read more.

Meghan Cahill
League Director of Communications

Cahill joined the League in December 2008 and has a BA in Media Communications with a concentration in Italian Studies from the College of Charleston.

Some people with advanced Parkinson’s disease, who cannot walk, can ride bikes. (NYTimes)

A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds that women who got at least 60 minutes a day of moderately intense exercise kept from gaining weight over time, but only if they were in good shape to begin with. (Boston Globe)

Thanks to Anne Lusk for sending both articles [via the Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Planners (APBP) listserv].

Darren Flusche
League Policy Analyst

Flusche joined the League in April 2009 and has a B.A. in history from Syracuse University and a Masters of Public Administration with a concentration in public policy analysis from New York University.