The Built Environment, Activity, and Walking

This weekend's incredibly gorgeous weather forecast has me eagerly anticipating a lot of time in the sunshine, and thinking about what a huge impact the built environment can have on people in innumerable ways.

Today, a friend sent me a link to Not Just Child’s Play, an article in BU Today about a study that has found that renovated playgrounds appear to improve the MCAS math scores of kids who attend those schools. It may be that a nice playground makes kids feel more invested in school, or more valued, or it may mean they're more likely to run around and be active over the course of the day. Who knows, but whatever the cause, there seems to be a connection between the built environment around schools and kids' ability to learn.

Similarly, another friend send me a link to Brain Gains, a feature focusing on the huge benefit to learning that physical activity provides. Many of us live in environments that don't encourage, or actively discourage physical activity and movement over the course of the day, and an increasing body of research suggests that this is bad for our physical health, mental health, learning, productivity and mood.

Is your physical environment encouraging you to be active? Do you have sidewalks or trails where you can walk? Can you easily cross streets and do you enjoy greenery and clean streets in your neighborhood? Are there places to walk to, if you want to run errands on foot?

Increasingly, it appears that the answers to these questions have implications not merely for how much you walk but also for how you feel, how friendly and welcoming your neighborhood is, how much crime takes place there, and the price of homes there. We at WalkBoston often wrestle with the perception of walking as a "pedestrian" activity that people take for granted, but pedestrian advocacy is important because it connects to almost every element of our lives.

Do you know why you drive the way you do?

As far as I can tell, all drivers speed. I do it; every single driver I've been driven by in the last year does it; you almost certainly do it, too. I find myself speeding for a lot of reasons, but they nearly all boil down to: I speed because I feel safe doing so. After all, if I didn't feel safe, I'd slow down, right?

That's the conclusion reached by An empirical analysis of driver perceptions of the relationship between speed limits and safety, a recent study at Purdue University. As the abstract states:

A key motivating factor in drivers’ tendency to exceed the speed limit is that they believe that the excess speed does not threaten safety. This paper, specifically studies this matter by using a survey that asked drivers how fast above the speed limit they feel they can drive before safety is threatened ... Estimation findings show that drivers’ perception of the speed above the speed limit at which they will receive a speeding ticket is a critical determinant of what they believe is a safe speed – suggesting that enforcement plays an important role in safety perceptions. Other variables found to be significant factors in determining the speed above the speed limit at which safety is first threatened include age, gender, being previously stopped for speeding, and drivers’ ethnicity.

This means that planners and advocates who want cars to slow down should focus not on speed laws but instead on changing drivers' perceptions. We don't want streets that are unsafe, but we do want them to feel unsafe, or just a little. For example, we know that narrowing the lane of traffic will slow driving speeds as drivers feel more constrained. Making neighborhood streets bumpy rather than smooth will discourage people from flying down the street far better than putting up a speed limit sign.

What are other effective ways you've experienced a decrease in your sense of safety at speed?