Healthier Living Involves an Urban Home
Dustin on 01 29, 2006
A recent study was just released that concludes that living in a walkable neighborhood is healthier than living in the suburbs! Another good reason to live in Seattle!
The Seattlest nominated this article for the “No Shit Sherlock” department in that it does not take a study to conclude that people who walk more will be healthier. However, to the study’s benefit, this kind of data gets used in the most obscure (yet important) ways. For example, I found the data to be extremely useful for a transportation demand management (TDM) tool I recently built for the Washington Department of Transportation (WSDOT). It can be so darn hard to quantify the benefits that make neighborhoods special that sometimes us engineers, (yes, I am an engineer by training) latch onto relatively obscure concepts like “walkability” in order to differentiate good neighborhoods from bad! Besides just letting us know that a walkable neighborhood is a healthier place to live, the study also helped to define what it means for a neighborhood to be walkable!
Bonus: One piece of my involvement in the TDM study involved creating a map that displayed the walkability of every single neighborhood in King County. My memory of the map was that the most walkable neighborhoods were almost all located in Seattle (surprise) with only a few located in the Eastside. If you’re really interested in learning more about what makes a neighborhood “walkable”, let me know!
The moral of this long-winded post? Living in a walkable neighborhood is not only more pleasant, but better for you!
About the Author: Dustin Luther
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http://www.explorekirkland.com/things_to_do.cfm?content=106
The above will take you to the Neighborhood Walk Routes for each of Kirkland.’s neighborhoods. So much for Seattle being the only walkable city! LOL
As I recall, they outline three levels of difficulty from easy, moderate to hard. I expect easy would not have as many hilly streets to climb. Three walk routes per neighborhood.
If you google “walk routes Kirkland” you will find some of the meeting notes of the walk committee that you may find helpful to your group.
For some of us in West Seattle, this issue brings up cringe-inducing echoes of the old fight over “urban villages.” Anybody remember that? The term itself went off to a mostly unmourned death — but the vision not only lives on, but is taking shape in a big way on this side of the pond. Tons of high-density condos/townhomes, especially surrounding the business districts. And that’s the ultimate in walkability.
Out of curiosity, what makes you cringe about urban villages? As you allude, there is a lot of development going on within Seattle’s urban villages, and while this might upset some long-term residents, it has helped to increase land values in those areas tremendously.
oh, it wasn’t the urban villages themselves that made us cringe. It was the fight over them. So small-minded. And ultimately futile, since it happened anyway, and things seem the better for it.