Countrywide natural experiment links built environment to physical activity | Hacker News Reader

Countrywide natural experiment links built environment to physical activity

nature.com

59 pointsAnon8444 comments

It’s funny how as we increase a nations gdp, and general wealth, we commodify everything. day care, dog walkers, psychical activity, etc and then we have to go back and do all this market research and artificially recreate what was holistic about the more rural way of life.

There really is no free lunch!

Rural doesn't mean walkable, unless you mean either pre-automobile or physical jobs.

It does and it doesn't. Walking a mile used to be nothing. Now it's a social status signifier, being able to afford to be able to use your own legs to go places. Even at that, most who do probably still spend more time paying to go to some gym.

True. I grew up in the country, along a busy road. I never walked or biked anywhere, and it was very isolating. Moving to a city that had quiet residential streets, wide sidewalks, and actual bike paths was a game changer for me.

I wonder how much damage that did to me, to have that lack of physical activity during my formative years.

An issue for kids nowadays is being outside unattended is basically illegal (for instance IL / Chicago, minimum age unattended is 14). Therefore they might get more activity in the country on a bigger acreage alongside an unwalkable road, than they would in the city in a walkable area, unlike an adult.

As soon as you get near people, if there is a enough, a Karen will rat the kid out as soon as they touch public property and maybe before it. They are only safe from CPS tyrants when they are out of sight.

Your concerns are extremely valid, but it is not _that_ bad in many places in America. I relocated my family specifically so that my kids could have a walkable community to live in, and since then (about five years), we've had no issues with them getting to schools, parks, the library, friends' houses, and downtown shops on their own.

That said, we live in the inner district of a small city that was settled in the mid 19th century, so it has a street grid, alleys, uninterrupted sidewalks, etc.... everything that makes a place as safe as possible in this day and age for kids to get around without getting hit by a car. (One exception being dedicated biking infrastructure, which would be awesome.)

At what age did you start letting your kids run errands or walk to school by themselves?

In Chicago, kids start going to school by themselves between 8 and 13 depending on how comfortable their parents are with them behaving properly on the way to school.

Mine walked to school (< 10 minute walk) at about second grade. Running errands at about fourth.

It's not illegal to leave a child under 14 unattended in Illinois. It is however illegal to leave a child under 14 unattended for an unreasonable amount of time in Illinois.

Here's an actual page from the government explaining the law and even providing the text of the law: https://dcfs.illinois.gov/for-families/safety/preparing-your...

If you follow their advice and your child is ready to reasonably able to be left alone unattended, you can leave even 8-9 year olds unattended for long periods of time. It's not odd for children to be home alone after school for 4-8+ hours.

Your opinion on "CPS" in Illinois (I assume you meant DCFS and not Chicago Public Schools) is based on not understanding a single paragraph of the law that is written to be readable by the general public.

Kids go all over the place in Chicago while under 14 without their parents. It's literally not an issue.

Illinois lawyers [0] and child's rights policy thinkers [1] had evaluated it to mean a child under 14 can not be 'reasonably' left alone, up until 2023. It looks like you are correct and they updated it recently under an amended 705 ILCS 405/2-3 in January 2023.

Unless your child was born in the past couple years or following legislation, I think most people don't realize this, as even most the law firms still have the old '14' as the min age on their neglect pages. So you are correct with the asterisk that it glosses over that it was the case up until the past couple years and you are updating us on a new development.

>Your opinion on "CPS" in Illinois (I assume you meant DCFS and not Chicago Public Schools) is based on not understanding a single paragraph of the law that is written to be readable by the general public.

My opinion is based on what legal advice I got when I last researched it a few years ago. A lot of Illinois law is read in the context of common law precedent that makes the actual text less reliable. Mea Culpa.

[0] https://www.mkfmlaw.com/blog/at-what-age-can-a-child-be-left...

[1] https://www.illinoispolicy.org/illinois-has-highest-home-alo...

Your first source is trying to sell a service, namely lawsuits against your ex. The law in 2022 was the same [0] in regards to the text that I mentioned. And as far as I can tell, that's the original text of the law as it was first passed in 1987.

The 2024 update [1] was basically just fixing typos.

The 2023 update [2] was reaffirming the original text and added safeguards to prevent abuse by police and prosecutors misapplying the law. This update did remove the explicit age mentioned, but if you look at the deleted text, you had to leave a minor unattended for a very long period of time not just "a trip to the store" for the law to have been violated before the change despite what the divorce attorneys were trying to tell people on their misleading website.

Also, I'm not going to go into my rant about IPI intentionally misleading people and lying by omissions and funny ways of presenting "data". If you use them as a source for anything and expect that what you read was the truth, then that's on you. They're a propaganda organization that spreads even more disinformation than the Heritage Foundation.

[0] https://codes.findlaw.com/il/chapter-705-courts/il-st-sect-7...

[1] https://www.ilga.gov/Legislation/publicacts/view/103-0605

[2] https://www.ilga.gov/Legislation/publicacts/view/103-0233

I can't comprehend an environment where kids aged 14 can't be independent. From age 5, I walked 20 minutes to and from school every day.

It's not like those things weren't all getting done before. They just didn't generate commerce and didn't generate GDP. GDP goes up because of commodifying all those things. It's not clear if it's actually more efficient this way though.

That’s my point really, we just commercialized everything, and introduced a bunch of extra steps. Could argue it enabled us to scale and handle very large amounts of people residing together.

GDP doesn't represent much about output so much as how much money people pay for what outputs. It follows directly from this that if you want to increase GDP, you start commodifying activities that previously were not measured in economic terms, e.g. childcare, art, etc.

I live in the most urban environment that exists in my country and get significantly more physical activity than the car-dependent rural dwellers in my family. As it is, I am almost 40 and have never owned a car, cities are great.

That probably means you are an outlier.

One thing I see, is that people in urban environments typically opt-in to exercise (like voluntarily going on a run). Whereas those in more rural areas have more physical demanding jobs and responsibilities.

I’m an urban-based desk jockey who exercises a lot but it doesn’t really compare to my more rurally-based friends who are on their feet working blue collar jobs 5 days a week.

no, I am talking about actual urban environments where people get around by walking, cycling, or maybe using public transit. Sure, I voluntarily lift and go for a run. But if I want to see friends, buy food, go to the doctor, go to the pharmacy or the record store or the gym or generally leave my apartment I have to walk.

Suburbanites who are only active while engaging in intentional exercise because they need to get in their car to go anywhere are in the worst situation.

> Suburbanites who are only active while engaging in intentional exercise because they need to get in their car to go anywhere are in the worst situation.

This is true. We have nowhere to go on foot. In every direction we have roads, private property and that's it.

If we walk we risk automobile/pedestrian injury, unless we'd prefer to risk trespassing charges. This is also the full selection of kids' choices, btw.

> This is also the full selection of kids' choices, btw.

I grew up in an environment where these where my choices and it was terrible, it's a big part of why I've made "being able to go anywhere on foot" a goal.

I get 1 mile of walking in a day at a minimum just going to and from the train in Chicago. I hit the 6K steps minimum that my watch wants by default every day by around 1-2pm if I take the bus transfer from the train to my office. I usually end around 8-10K steps just doing my commute and walking around the office. Going to the grocery store is another 2K steps roundtrip. Going out to dinner is another 1+ mile of walking minimum unless I get fast food.

When I lived in suburbs, I had to go out of my way to get even 6K steps in a whole day.

It’s funny how in a society everything gets commodified to the point of commodifying what you previously got (for free) as a side-effect of the typical lifestyle? I don’t think that’s “funny” as in ironic or puzzling—I think it’s entirely freaking predictable.

Be right back. I just have to look for a completely quiet treadmill for the open office where I spend my life.

It’s funny how people think history is such a railroaded farce of “more progress more better” that when people get obese due to driving too much then that’s just the oopsie-doopsie irony of progress “backfiring”. No free lunch. I guess it’s easy to sell people on whatever is the status quo when all they can imagine is a straight line either regressing or progressing.

The places that they see people walking the most are places like New York or San Fransisco. In what way are these places rural?

I’d like to see a study like this for young kids. Anecdotally, I ran through the woods until I went to college and stress about the urban life I’m providing for my kids

It might depend on what you mean by urban. Are there a lot of places your kids can walk to from your residence? I'm thinking of schools, parks, stores, etc. or are you in a place where they really have to be driven everywhere?

True. Older (in the U.S., pre-war) neighborhoods actually provide kids with far more opportunities for walking than newer, cul-de-sac based suburban neighborhoods. I keep wondering when we're going to stop allowing such immobilizing, isolating neighborhoods to be built.

The first time I looked at a city map of my home town and saw the division between the prewar streetcar suburbs, and the postwar neighborhoods, was a revelation. Before the war: everything is on a grid, and there are alleys for utilities and garages down every block. Easy to walk everywhere. After: no more alleys, cul-de-sacs everywhere, traffic funneled onto arterials, unwalkable.

Or at least start allowing pre war style neighborhoods to even be built again.

I don’t think it’s so much a matter of banning “bad” development as allowing all kinds.

I'd love to see cities put efforts into connecting those isolated cultures-de-sac neighborhoods with pedestrian and bike paths.

I can understand the desire to reduce through-traffic which sometimes comes with speeding or aggressive drivers. But walking and cycling to your friends house shouldn't mean going a mile out to the entrance of your neighborhood, down the busy highway, then a mile back in to their house when they were only half a mile away to begin with.

Cities charge a right-of-way fee, planning, and permitting process every time you connect to a public road. The county/city planning committee often requires new neighborhoods to cover the cost (often via HOA) of roads and their easements in the neighborhood. The end result is the neighborhood private planners have their hand forced to eliminate thru-traffic and minimize connections to arterials.

The county would basically have to do the opposite to change things; provide low-cost/low-overhead process for connecting to public road and pay neighborhoods/HOA for connecting to arterials to offload the traffick and provide thru-routes. Otherwise the public is just leaching off the private roads, and due to neighborhood planning requirements they usually can't charge a toll to get it back, so it gets designed to avoid that.

I'm suggesting not limiting foot and bike traffic just because we choose to limit car traffic. There are lots of routes between places in my town that would be much more direct, and safe, on a bike if there were small connecting paths between neighborhoods, including those built at different times by different developers, instead of being forced out onto the arterials.

Yeah, I think that's the part that I was suggesting should be "banned". All neighborhoods should connect with all adjacent neighborhoods via pedestrian or multiuse paths. And yes, that means across arterials as well -- either have an official surface crossing with appropriate traffic calming measures / pedestrian islands, or build a tunnel.

My neighborhood was platted in the late 50s, and it has what the kids call "secret sidewalks" that cut between the houses and connect the streets. It's the best of both worlds: Minimal car traffic, but easy to get around by walking. The secret sidewalks also radiate outward from the elementary school, approximately.

The power of desire paths.

> The secret sidewalks also radiate outward from the elementary school, approximately.

That is awesome. City planners should take note.

Also, I just realized that the tiny path I take to get into the next neighborhood only exists because of the elementary school there.

I don’t like cul-de-sacs in general but they can be walkable if there are shortcuts for pedestrians/cyclists and only cars has to follow a long way. You also need amenities in a walking distance. One can find such neighbourhoods in the UK.

This is broken at the top and bottom. Your elected representatives don't know that a bicycle network even exists. Safer roads for cars are their only transportation priority.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bicycle_Route_Sy...

Wow. It’s fun to compare the US bicycle routes to the bicycle routes in the Netherlands.

Here’s the first Wikipedia photo of USBR 1:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Bicycle_Route_1#/media/...

Look, it’s a road on which is possible, but not necessarily desirable, to ride a bike.

The Netherlands has at least two systems:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LF-routes

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbered-node_cycle_network

and neither article emphasizes the dramatic difference between these and the US system, possibly because it’s utterly obvious to anyone who has ever used the Dutch system: the Dutch bike routes are far, far higher quality. You can bike from almost anywhere to almost anywhere with the bulk of the route (at least outside of a city center) on paths are well separated from cars or even nowhere near a road at all. A lot of them even separate pedestrians from bikes or separate fast bikes from slow bikes. Even the worse bike paths are better than most bike paths in the US. If you ride the bike paths to a major store or a mall, you will generally find that the dedicated bike parking is closer than the car parking. If you go to a smaller store, a cafe or a house, you will be able to get from the nearest bike path to the building without crossing a traffic lane. If you go to a busy area, you might find a double decker bike parking lot!

This works well in a country with more bikes than people. Those paths are heavily utilized.

The US has excellent bike paths as well, but they are largely the exception, not the norm, and the almost entirely fail to connect into a cohesive system on which you can safely bike from point A to point B without ending up on nasty roads for large fractions of the trip.

I'm confused. Usually a "natural experiment" is a chance event that affects some random subset of a population. Here, they seem to be using "natural experiment" to refer to the event that someone decides to move to a different city. But obviously the subset of people in Amarilllo, TX who decide to move to New York, NY are going to be somewhat different than the subset who don't. So isn't this confounded?

It's really strange that they just jump into the paper and keep saying "natural experiment" over and over again without any justification that they actually have one. They do eventually get to this in the "Selection effects in relocation and mobile app usage" section, but I think they really downplay the seriousness of the issue.

I think they were claiming that people who move to certain cities increase their activity after moving, regardless of where they come from.

All I could glean from the abstract is that people walk more in walkable cities.

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