The Need for "Activity-Friendly" Suburbs

I was visiting with a friend this past weekend in the town we grew up in - a bedroom community of 120,000 and we were remarking how incredible it is that the town has never had much for young people to do. Options include: catch a movie (at the strip mall); go out to eat (at the strip mall); go bowling (at the strip mall); go shopping (at the strip mall). The neighborhoods are so spread out that few kids bike or walk to school and they need a car or a ride from someone to meet up with friends. Bike lanes are few and far between, and cars view bicyclists as a nuisance. It's not the most pleasant place for a child to grow up - no wonder all the kids are staying home and playing video games.

A recent study in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine attempts to address this issue with a "top-10 list of ways to turn sedentary cities and suburbs into 'activity-friendly' communities. The point, they say, is to fight obesity by encouraging people to get more incidental activity into their daily lives."

The study's authors pinpoint the amount of time we spend in our cars each day as a contributing factor in low levels of exercise.

Suggestions included creating more bike lanes and scenic walking routes, improving mass transportation, and developing mixed-use communities that would allow people to walk to routine destinations.