150 minutes a week is about than 22 minutes a day. Like 11 minutes twice a day. This looks like a really low effort to rid oneself of the risk of early decline.
As you might guess, their outcomes improved greatly.
I think people get this image in their head that someone who doesn't exercise ever is this comically fat unemployed person when in reality it's the average office worker who isn't fitness minded. A good chunk of HN users wouldn't be getting 15 minutes of exercise a day.
The environment and culture needs to be structured such that people get the exercise they need "naturally". The vast majority aren't going to go out of their way for it.
That would be impossible in a suburban setting; at best, one of these destinations would be within the theoretical waking distance, but without the walkways.
Not necessarily true. The "village center" idea Jim Rouse used in his design of Columbia, MD could be used to solve the problem.
All of these things are within walking distance if you live in Columbia's village of Wilde Lake (and, of course, your health insurance covers the primary care physicians in walking distance).
I'm guessing you're thinking of typical "stroad" suburbs, but alternatives are possible and do exist.
Unfortunately, the suburb has to be the product of planning like Columbia. Typical "emergent" suburbs turn into unwalkable ones.
If you want public health outcomes, actual scale, you get much better outcomes by not having that regulatory system at all.
The original reason for low population density was agricultural work, which - even in the early days of mechanisation - was plenty physical.
Living in exurbia to work and consume like a city dweller is a new kind of stupid.
In fact, if you really stop zoning, there's a decent chance companies will ASK to operate transit for you, because those population densities and no free car competition can make it profitable. This happens in many cities!
Mixed use development happens if you let it happen. Banks and developers like money, and mixed use makes way more money, so they want to build it. Sometimes they fuck up and don't, and those land owners pay the price and retrofit. And that's fine. Again, just let them.
In high engagement Western societies, where people get involved in politics and urban planning, "design" universally leads to car subsidies and shitty outcomes. The market does a way better job.
You need considerable govt intervention, just aimed properly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit-oriented_development
Try this: go to your favorite frontier LLM (I like Gemini pro - free in aistudio), paste this entire exchange we're having, and ask it to carefully analyze it and assess who seems more correct. It's a long story.
It also doesn't matter. Which sounds weird, but it's true. If you just let people build density without transit, the market will almost always build it in convenient places (a bank won't underwrite if they don't think it'll be successful), the people who move into it will either be happy with walking or they'll organize.
I've done a lot of such organization, if you're curious. I spearheaded Seattle's successful 2016 ballot measure for $50 billion in additional rail transit, much of which is now under construction. It'll take more ballot measures, but we're getting there: https://seattletransitblog.com/2011/11/23/lets-build-a-seatt... And along the way, we had to save bus service, so I forced the city to do that too: https://www.seattlemet.com/news-and-city-life/2014/04/friend...
I think the big reason gridlock and pollution happen in a lot of other countries is more about lack of traffic laws, and lack of pollution controls. In Seattle we're selling a lot of electric vehicles. Maybe we get some gridlock, but that reduces road deaths. It's not necessarily a bad thing. Because we are willing to shift road space to bicycle infrastructure, we will end up with bicycling getting a higher share of trips if cars slow down. And then we will have a healthier population as well!
Human populations naturally gravitate towards walking, and it's pretty much active sabotage of the outside environment that has broken this.
The hard part is "just". If you have mechanisms that allow neighbors to have an opinion at all, they will organize around it, they will stop growth, and you will eventually get San Francisco and New York restrictions anywhere that has high demand.
If I drive, it takes me 15 minutes (Toronto traffic is horrible). So doesn’t even gain me much in terms of time.
Just sad that temperatures here drop so low I don’t want to walk for half the year lol.