Negative effects of driving and living near traffic
qz.com
qz.com
This jibes with my experiences when I started walking 5+ miles a day (that was before I had young kids that absorbed every minute of free time). I felt like it did make me smarter. Or at least, better at programming and writing.
I now commute by bicycle, and I think that is somewhere on the spectrum between driving and walking. But even on a bicycle, you have to be in "collision avoidance mode" pretty much continuously. Your mind still wanders -- but with a lot more interruptions and alerts.
I think there is something "magic" about walking -- by which I mean something great, but something that we may not be able to scientifically understand in my lifetime. We know we evolved to walk upright, and we can measure a lot of the physical health benefits it confers, but we still don't know enough about the brain to prove that it benefits cognition, happiness, satisfaction, etc.
I strongly suspect that it does, though.
Ideally, I'd walk a mile to work through a forest, nature trail, or a large park.
Exercise, or just a simple walk, is critical for our lives. It affects our outlook on life. We don't lack the ability to handle the busyness of modern life.
We lack the priority of taking care of ourselves.
We're definitely not wired to weigh long term consequences properly :(
for further reading, consider: http://www.amazon.com/Religion-Human-Evolution-Paleolithic-A...
I hope you find these examples horrible regardless of your opinions on CO2-governed climate change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFO0ayOz9FY (Warning: This is a horrific video that shows climate change activists graphically executing children and others who disagree with the climate change orthodoxy. It was produced by the climate change activist group 1010uk to promote reduction of carbon dioxide emissions.)
Or maybe we should only strangle doubters and "their kind" in their sleep (Joe Romm). Or just have trials with unspecified consequences (James Hansen).
Persecution and execution are more strongly correlated with tribalism and ambition than religion. See French Revolution, Nazi-ism, high school, and internet comment forums.
Religion is an excuse for persecution, not usually a cause.
Except the most poetic part of the article that recounts the results of heavy car traffic and lack of foot transportation — a huge negative impact on our sociology, not just on our physical health.
I have become a proponent for walkable cities, public transportation reform, streets hidden from pedestrians, and narrow city roads. I'm extremely pessimistic about everyone else getting on board with these studies, though. People are quite proud of driving and their cars. We need to move forward and evolve transportation for the sake of our physical and mental health and for the sake of our society. I'm wondering how to get that national conversation started.
When people visit me in SF from more car-heavy areas, they're shocked to learn that I never have owned a car here. But by the time they've ridden our 4 mass transit networks, used a rental bike, taken a ferry, and gone with me somewhere in a CarShare car, it makes more sense. When they hear that I don't pay for car repairs or insurance or gas, they really start to get it.
We got this over decades of local conversation and iteration, consciously borrowing from other cities like New York and Amsterdam. Other cities can do it too if they want. And I think many are. I hear lots of of good things about cities being increasingly friendly to pedestrians and cyclists.
We are massively subsidizing it by: -Not pricing in to user fees all costs of roads (especially over several life cycles of the road). This applies to highways but also local roads where infra in sprawly neighborhoods costs more than denser/centric neighborhoods but usually are paying same property tax rate -Not pricing in to user fees cost of resource security (oil) -Not pricing in to user fees all externalities of personal auto use on health care system - what is healthier our system or one where you have to walk a bit? -Mandating from the highest level an interstate highway system, the funding of which no common person understands (gas tax goes in and then distributed around country to pay for 90% of road project - why not local funding so people understand where the money comes from?) -We are not regulating green field development - we are letting developers build what they want because it makes the most money without asking how is the best way to build the city. Is the best way to build a city "leave it to the developers to build what makes them most money" ? -Our zoning is designed to separate stuff which makes cars the only option.
Why does this matter? Because the government is choosing how we build our cities and they are choosing cars. It is not the free market.
Check out Jeff Speck "Walkable City" for lots of facts, examples, and ways forward.
I think you're confusing subsidizing it with taxing it like cigarettes. We don't discourage driving because that would discourage utilization of land that isn't located near a population center. Land is a natural resource that we can't practically use up (short of massively contaminating it) and to discourage its use would be moronic.
I think we subsidize it because we thought it was a good idea back in the day - we chose cars and for example, Spain, chose trains. There are pros and cons to each. I suppose my point is that we CHOSE at every level of government.
This is the lens I see the world through and I think choosing cars (or how Spain chose trains) massively effects a society's quality of life. I want people driving to know that we as a society chose to support cars - to subsidize them to make them cheaper - and there are pros and cons (eg. more freedom but less walking). Anecdotally, no one I know thinks about it - they assume that's just the way it is and there are no alternatives. Maybe even that it's the result of free market.
Can we please stop with this "Walking 30 minutes" ridiculousness. Yes it is correct, but only if you compare the 30-minute walkers with shutins or elderly people who rarely if ever get out of their chairs. Most of us already get far more than 30-minutes of far more vigorous exercise.
I did 45 minutes in the pool today (2.75km) spent an hour walking my dog, and dealt with numerous stairs ramps and other not-sitting things. I'm not anything I would call "in shape" but would another 30 minutes of walking really reduce my diabetes risk by 40%? I think not. So stop telling us that extra 30-minutes of barely moving will make a hoot of difference.
Perhaps a leisurely 30 minute walk would make you less irritable, though? ;-)
However, I've also just got back from living three years in London, and compared to living in 3 American cities and one Brazilian city, I can tell you the difference of living in a truly pedestrian friendly city with solid multi-modal transport options leads to a lot more walking, and I felt the health benefits of this. Even considering that I cycle commuted in all of the aforementioned cities, just the convenience of not needing a car (nor uber or taxis for that matter) led to a lot more walking above and beyond my natural recreational activity which I would find a way to do anywhere I lived. It's hard to quantify, but it's very very real. In the US there are very few places where you can live and not feel severely restricted without a car—you can do it in New York, and you can sort of get away with it in SF (although a lot of people's lifestyles would collapse if they had to give up their Uber and Lyft to instead rely on Muni)—but most places metros are tiny or non-existent, and buses are primarily used by the poor and have terrible service. There's no doubt in my mind that this has huge impacts on public health, but of course it's impossible to isolate the effect and quantify it since countries that do these things differently have all sorts of confounding cultural differences.
I mean it's great that you're doing nearly 2 hours of exercise a day, but many people I know drive to work, sit down all day, drive home, sit down all evening. It seems to be pretty common at least across the UK:
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/aug/10/uk-exercise-l...
All that exercise and you're still crabby - maybe a walk would do you some good after all?
Even without adding new drivers, there is the horrific probability that autodrive cars could be used to avoid parking fees. Why pay for parking when the car can circle the mall for a few hours on its own?
The reduced cost of operation may also result in more vehicles. (I disagree, but most here assume will be cheaper than a standard car+driver.) If vehicles suddenly become far cheaper to operate, any number of businesses may send out autodrives where today doing so would be cost-prohibitive. The private security industry surely has ideas for autodrive cars to replace on-foot security patrols. And, as with uber, the addition of transport options priced somewhere between taxis and public transit surely will draw customers from the later.