That you need to be driven at all to exercise is a huge part of the reason why exercise and fitness rates are so low in our youth. Our grandparents and great grandparents walked miles to go to school five days a week, and we've built our cities such that this is impossible or dangerous. We now live in towns that sprawl endlessly, and most of us forbid our kids to go outside unsupervised, so kids never find each other and play amongst themselves.
And for what? What exactly are we gaining by building our cities and our towns like this? It makes us all unhealthier because we are forced to drive everywhere. It isolates us and our children, who are now lonely on top of being merely physically inactive. We are poorer because we spend so much money on car loans, car insurance, gas, and parking. We are just as likely to die a violent death in the suburbs due to the increase risk of car crashes. We are isolated, poor, unhealthy, and unhappy, and in exchange we get... what exactly?
> The paper isn’t public so “controlling for confounders” is all you get, but I doubt they went through all the effort to have deep, revealing conversations about the home life or other nuanced cofounders of each participant.
The study was conducted in Taiwan which does not suffer from US-style car extremism. "Children cannot go out to play because their parents cannot afford to drive them" is a statement they would consider unthinkably psychotic. Can they not use public transit, or at worst, walk to where all the other neighborhood children are playing unorganized?