Moving to a more walkable city pays off for health, scientists find

By Amina Zafar, CBC News, RCI

Buildings in Chinatown are pictured in Vancouver on May 8. Moving from a less walkable city to a more walkable one adds about 1,100 steps a day on average, researchers found.
Photo: CBC / Ethan Cairns

Smartphone data reveals a boost in physical activity based on where people live

People who moved to a walking friendly city walked more, and at the brisk pace favoured to improve health and prevent disease, a new natural experiment shows.

Walkable cities allow you to access more amenities on foot for daily life, like going to school or work, buying ingredients to make dinner or heading to the park to play. But that’s not available to everyone, given many cities and suburbs in Canada and the U.S. have been designed to emphasize transit by car, urban planners say.

Teasing out cause from effect — whether walkable cities lead people to move more or if people who like to walk tend to live in more pedestrian-friendly cities — is important to nail down because it could help encourage more investment in safe sidewalks and zoning to encourage physical activity, medical researchers say.

To find out, Tim Althoff, a computer science professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, used data from a step-tracking app to compare daily steps of more than 5,400 people who moved between major U.S. cities.

In short, we found that your city can help make you healthier, Althoff said. The design of your city impacts how much you walk and as a result, your health.

Paul Sharma of Peel Public Health says the region is working to improve the walkability of Mississauga and Brampton’s sprawling neighbourhoods. Photo: CBC / Craig Chivers

Althoff and his co-authors said in this week’s issue of the journal Nature that moving from a less walkable city to a more walkable one adds about 1,100 steps a day on average.

It’s something the computer scientist has seen first-hand.

I grew up in a rural area in Germany, Althoff said. I’ve lived in California and now in Seattle. Personally, I’m a really big fan of public transit, but I also, for instance, intentionally move to a neighborhood where it would be close to a bus stop.

Canadian and international guidelines recommend adults get 150 minutes or more a week of moderate to vigorous physical activity a week. The researchers found people who lived in more walkable cities were about twice as likely to accumulate those steps.

Dr. Laura Rosella, a professor of epidemiology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto, said several high-quality Canadian studies point to decreased risk of Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and prediabetes as well as mental health benefits from more walkable cities.

Pedestrians walking in Old Montreal on a sunny day. The city has slowly increased the walkability of the Plateau neighbourhood, an urban planner says. Photo: Radio-Canada / Charles Contant

We spend lots of money on the health care system, Rosella. This [walkability] is something that literally we could make small tweaks that could have a huge difference.

To apply the findings in Canada’s climate, Rosella said, policy makers would also need to take into account safety considerations, like clearing snow and ice on sidewalks.

Benefits of mixed density

Ahmed El-Geneidy, a professor in urban planning at McGill University, said it takes about 15 years to gradually make changes to neighbourhoods and change the culture so people walk around cities more.

The whole idea is that you need to build high density beside the single family homes, El-Geneidy said. That’s how areas like Montreal’s Plateau neighbourhood encouraged people to walk to more destinations, like grocery shops, he said.

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Paul Sharma, director of chronic disease and injury prevention at Peel Public Health, said Mississauga and Brampton’s sprawling suburban neighbourhoods are sedentary places. Residents tend to have longer commutes compared to elsewhere in Ontario, according to the region’s data.

To design more walkable communities, Peel officials say they’re working on factors like increasing density, proximity to services, and making wider sidewalks with better lighting and shade.

This is where public health and local planners need to work closely together to improve the health of the residents, Sharma said.

At a playground in Calgary’s Crestmount residential neighbourhood, Jarek Soltys said the family chose the location to be close to the mountains and walking paths, where they get steps in for enjoyment, but not transportation for errands.

When we moved here seven years ago there really wasn’t anything here at all, not even a convenience store so we knew we would be driving places, Soltys said. That is the reality of the suburbs in a big city.

With files from CBC’s Alison Northcott and Melanie Glanz

This article is republished from RCI.