Why we need pedestrian advocacy ...

Do you walk around your neighborhood and think to yourself, "Hey, this isn't so bad. I can walk from my house to the store to the bus stop and it's really not so hard ..."? Or does your neighborhood look more like this:



(From There, I Fixed It.)

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.

Boston: #2 for walkability

Every year, a variety of magazines and organizations make a list of the most walkable cities in the US, and Boston is consistently in the top ten, usually the top five. This is partially simply a lucky break due to the fact that Boston's winding streets and dense population is what we have to work with around here, so we've never had a chance to spread out the way a lot of western-US cities have done. Still, we often beat out Philadelphia and Washington, DC, so it's not exclusively an artifact of timing.

Prevention magazine just came out with the top 25 walking cities for the year and has listed Boston as #2, behind San Francisco. Now, I'm not sure I agree with listing Boston before New York, but never mind that: go, Boston! Though I have to laugh that the picture they use is of Cambridge, not Boston. Okay, never mind that, either.

So, the reason they give for our high rank this year? "Improvements such as longer WALK signals and bright, patterned intersections encourage more people to walk."

And this is the part of the post where I get to be all excited and wave my hands around with glee, because the reason for those improvements? WalkBoston, and especially the work on signal timing that WalkBoston cofounder Dorothea Hass has been doing for years. Ironically, of course, we at WalkBoston continue to be frustrated at all the work still to be done to improve signal timing for pedestrians in Boston, but it's a delight to see that Boston's getting some shout-outs on the basis of what we've done so far.

So, hey, nice going, Dorothea! And Boston!