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Comment by loandbehold | Hacker News Reader

Are there any studies that show that walkability improves mental health?

Here's a meta analysis[1] from 2012 showing that walking has a strong positive effect on depression. Here's one showing that biking and walking for commuting were associated with improved physical/mental health[2]. Here's a newer study showing benefits to the elderly from walking in urban green spaces[3].

Seems like a well supported idea.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S17552...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01604...

[3] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.5759...

These studies just shows that exercise improves mental health. I doubt anyone disputes that. The question is — are there benefits from walking directly, benefits that you can't get by say going to the gym. The claim of urban density advocates is that just being around thousands of strangers improves mental health.

Walking is basically free, and if you live in a walkable place trivial to build into a daily routine. Even if you exercise regularly but are otherwise sedentary you'll have improved outcomes from adding some walking. These seem to me to be obvious claims.

> just being around thousands of strangers

The nit I would pick here is that you aren't around thousands of strangers per se, but a large number of acquaintances in addition to those strangers. I see neighbors, local business owners, and the folks that work at shops and cafes nearby every time I leave my house in the city. I'm on a first name basis with many of them and we greet each other on the street. If I drove places I would miss out on the exercise and those small social interactions.

that's the cool thing about walking/biking, it has built-in exercise for something that most people did on an almost daily basis (commute)

no need to book 2 additional hours every few days and overcome that inner demon to go to the gym :)

Not living in the suburbs improves mental health.

Not if you are living in a noisy and polluted location, which is the case for most people without a car, clichees aside.

Or just filled with so-called "night life" that so many people think they would participate more in if they lived closer.

The novelty wears off after a few years and with kids it becomes more of an annoyance than anything else.

I am a massive hermit. I still benefit from living right in our city, because now instead of getting in my car to go get takeout, I walk from my apartment to the restaurant to get takeout. This is regular exercise I never had before.

Sure, I'm not out clubbing every night, but I am still better off in a walkable environment than I was before.

This is horrible too, and I agree :)

The places with low rates of car ownership in the US are cities like D.C., NYC, SF, Boston, and Chicago. These aren't heavily polluted places, NYC in fact has great air quality most of the time due to prevailing winds. The ten worst cities for Air pollution have 0 overlap with the bottom 10 cities in car ownership.

Averaging air pollution (noise pollution is just as bad, btw) over a huge metropolitan area is not a meaningful metric though, I think.

You aren't going to see meaningfully different air pollution levels in micro areas most of the time unless there's something like a highway or large source of smoke. If you look at AQI measurements around NYC they're all within about 10 points, excluding 1 sensor that's right by a huge bus depot, and it's 20 points higher than the minimum, but maybe 10-15 above the average.

Also, noise pollution DEFINITELY isn't just as bad as air pollution. No doubt it CAN cause stress and CAN disrupt sleep, but air pollution is clearly a far bigger problem in general.

The cars are what make it noisy and polluted of course.

My favorite places in the world are small walkable towns in nature. Sprawling car-centric suburbia has more asphalt than trees. It sucks.

Even as a nature lover, I’d rather live in Manhattan NYC than car-centric suburbia like Central Los Angeles is.

Can you back that up with any study at all? Or are we counting smug anecdotes as facts these days?

Citation?

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