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Image: Fitness for Weight Loss

Happy Bike to Work Week, everybody! It’s a great time to give a gentle nudge to someone who you think would benefit from biking. In that vein, personal trainer and fitness coach Stephanie Averkamp of San Diego posted this infographic to her personal health website. She says she especially hopes to convince overweight and obese people to bike more.

“Biking’s a great exercise because it supports 50 to 70 percent of their body weight,” Averkamp told me. “It’s not like running. It’s something they can do without the extra weight and impact on their joints.” She said biking is a great way to get exercise outside of a gym, which can be intimidating and unpleasant.

She encourages people to start by biking halfway to work. “That counts!” she says.

Infographic after the jump.
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What if cars came with a Surgeon General’s warning like the ones that come on cigarette packs: “Sitting in this seat could lead to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression, and divorce.”

The Surgeon General wants your help to get more people to walk for exercise and transportation. Photo: Digital Deconstruction

Surgeon General Regina Benjamin is getting ready to go halfway there. She announced in December that she’d be issuing a call to action on walking sometime in 2014. Yesterday, she and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asked for help crafting the call.

The CDC opened a docket yesterday to solicit information from the public “on walking as an effective way to be sufficiently active for health.” That information will be used as part of the call to action.

The wording is notable. The CDC is making the case that even if walking is the only exercise you do, it could be “sufficient” to stay healthy.  It echoes the recent findings of Australian researchers, who concluded that going to the gym isn’t as effective as active transportation at keeping weight off – largely because it’s easier to work exercise into your day when it accomplishes two goals at once.

What the CDC is trying to do is identify not only what government agencies can do, but what civic organizations, health care providers, educational institutions, worksites, industry, and others can do to provide access to “safe, attractive and convenient places to walk (and wheelchair roll).”

The CDC is off to a good start even before the public chimes in with its collective wisdom. The request for public comment laid out the scope of the problem:
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Is your neighborhood designed to make people healthy or sick? With the right characteristics, the place where you live could add years to your life.

Children in Redondo Beach, California -- a Blue Zone community -- take part in morning exercises. LA Times

In 2004, Dan Buettner, CEO of the Blue Zones Project, partnered with researchers from National Geographic to study the places around the world that enjoy the greatest longevity. They found that what distinguishes places like Ikaria, Greece, and Okinawa, Japan, are environments and cultural attributes that foster community, family life, connectedness, and physical activity.

The team boiled down their research to nine principles for longevity and health. The number one principle? “Move Naturally.”

“The world’s longest-lived people don’t pump iron, run marathons or join gyms,” the researchers wrote. “Instead, they live in environments that constantly nudge them into moving without thinking about it.”

Now the Blue Zones Project — run by Healthways, a company focused on improving health, in partnership with AARP, Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield, and the Walkable and Livable Communities Institute — is trying to create cities and towns that promote wellness across the U.S.

More than a dozen places, from the Los Angeles suburbs to small-town Iowa, have been designated as “Blue Zone” communities. The partnership is helping these places advance complete streets, walking school buses, and safe routes to school. The program also focuses on goals like gardening, volunteering, smoking cessation, and providing access to fresh food.

“Seventy percent of our health outcomes are predicted by our behaviors and our environment,” said Laura Jackson of Wellmark, which insures 2 million people in Iowa and South Dakota, during a seminar at the New Partners for Smart Growth Conference taking place this week in Kansas City. “We searched around the world to try to find the magic bullet.”

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Walking can seem like a rather mundane thing to get organized about, until you realize that it’s a direct challenge to car-oriented transportation and it’s the best thing people can do for their health. Then walking is downright revolutionary.

U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Regina Benjamin exhorted advocates this morning to make walking "joyful." Photo by Tanya Snyder.

Not only that, but it can be joyful. That was the message that the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Regina Benjamin, brought to a gathering of walking advocates in Washington today. “We have to make being healthy joyful,” she said.

“One person’s joy might be to run a marathon,” she said. “Another person’s is just fit into an old pair of jeans. And another’s is just to sit up all day with their grandkids. We have to stop telling people what they can’t do or what they can’t eat. We have to tell them what they can do. They can go out for walks. They can go out with their friends.”

When Benjamin was nominated to her post, she was immediately barraged with questions about her own weight. Critics said it was inappropriate to have a full-figured person as the leading public health official in a country that struggles with a 36 percent obesity rate. But Dr. Benjamin’s message is, “If I can do it, anyone can do it.”

Benjamin recounted a tale of a friend of hers finding out she liked walking and inviting her to go on a walk – to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. She said she huffed and puffed her way back up the 4,000 feet of altitude change, but it was fun. “But you don’t have to have a national park,” she said. “You just have your street outside your house.”

The CDC is going to produce a Surgeon General’s report that is “a call to action on walking.” That’ll be accompanied by a national campaign for walking. “We want to lend the voice of the Office of the Surgeon General to this particular physical activity,” she said. “It’s easy to do, anyone can do it and it’s fun.”

She told Streetsblog after her remarks that it will, realistically, take 18 months to launch the call to action.

Benjamin’s commitment to walking as an inclusive form of physical exercise dovetails nicely with First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign, which also embraces biking and walking as a good way for young people to work physical activity into their day. And not only that: Dr. Benjamin ended her speech by thanking the walking advocates in the room for “implementing the Affordable Care Act’s prevention strategy.”

A British national health authority is advising UK residents to make walking and cycling the norm for short trips, in order to reduce the risk of chronic diseases associated with the nation’s obesity epidemic.

Inactivity poses greater risks than cycling, says one leading British medical expert. Photo: The Guardian

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence issued a 97-page report Wednesday on the topic with a number of recommendations. The National Health Service reports that 26 percent of British people are obese, while in America the figure is 35.7 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

The researchers recommends biking and walking as the best way to integrate more activity into the daily lives of British people, and they’re pressuring government officials to get to work on making active transportation a more attractive choice, according to the Guardian.

The report urges local governments to install more complete bicycle infrastructure, help schools establish “walking buses,” and encourage employers to create programs aimed at helping staff members drive less.

“We all face barriers in changing our lifestyles and many of us feel we don’t have the time or the inclination to add regular physical activity into our lives,” Dr. Harry Rutter, an obesity researcher who led the study for NICE, told the Guardian. “But walking and cycling – to work, to school, to the shops or elsewhere – can make a huge difference. It’s an opportunity to make these activities part of normal, routine daily behavior.”

Dr. Rutter has had to defend cycling from worrywarts who questioned whether the activity is too dangerous.

“This focus on the dangers of cycling is something to do with the visibility of them, and the attention it’s given,” he said. “What we don’t notice is that if you were to spend an hour a day riding a bike rather than being sedentary and driving a car there’s a cost to that sedentary time. It’s silent, it doesn’t get noticed. What we’re talking about here is shifting the balance from that invisible danger of sitting still towards the positive health benefits of cycling.”

Researchers report that inactivity in the UK is as big a public health problem as smoking. According to their metrics only one in four British women, and one in three men, are getting enough exercise to live healthy lives.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation launched their “New Public Health” website last year with the goal of meeting community members where they are to talk about public health. A lot of those conversations happen online, and they explore the connections between public health and policy decisions related to everything from education to transportation. Last week, they published an interview with U.S. DOT Secretary Ray LaHood.

They also put out a complete and convincing infographic showing why sustainable transportation modes are a key component of any public health strategy — and any healthy and prosperous community.

It highlights the positive health correlation between transit and health — and suggests that maybe the walk home from the train station is the best part of your commute. Experts say people are willing to walk a quarter mile to a bus stop and a half mile to a rail station. The more bus stops and rail stations there are, the more people get those healthy 19 minutes of walking, too.

Walking and biking as part of your commute can reduce obesity and your risk of a crash. And job sprawl that makes it harder for people to walk or bike to work cost communities money.

But don’t take my word for it — take it from the public health experts. Full infographic after the jump:

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On Thursday, DOT Secretary Ray LaHood announced the creation of a new Freight Policy Council, which is charged with coming up with a freight strategic plan. This is a first step toward a sorely lacking national plan around freight.

DOT Chief Ray LaHood announced the freight policy council's creation last week in Washington state. Photo courtesy of the secretary's FastLane blog

The movement of goods accounts for about a quarter of all transportation-related emissions. Every American is responsible for 40 tons of freight a year, according to DOT. Everyone agrees that freight is essential for the economic well-being of the country, and much more so given President Obama’s stated goal of doubling exports by 2015. “A more efficient freight network will reduce traffic congestion, environmental impact and shipping costs, which will lead to lower prices for consumers,” according to a press release by U.S. DOT. But up until now, there’s been no coherent policy around freight, or any governmental body tasked exclusively with looking at it.

A bill to create a national freight strategic plan and a permanent freight planning office at DOT was introduced two years ago but was always intended to be rolled into a reauthorization, not passed as a stand-alone bill. MAP-21 captured most of the elements of that plan, and advocates are glad to see it moving forward.

“Creation of a high-level, multimodal Freight Policy Council will go far in ensuring MAP-21’s freight provisions increase efficiency across all modes of the national freight network,” said Mortimer Downey, chair of the Coalition for America’s Gateways and Trade Corridors, in a statement. “Establishment of this Council signals a praiseworthy commitment to our national economy and global economic competitiveness.”

The operative word there is “multimodal.” For sustainable transportation advocates, that’s the key to whether this council – and the plan it comes up with – is transformative or disappointing. “Are they going to build a lot of truck-only lanes or are they going to look toward a smarter future where we’re moving as much as possible off the roads?” asks Ann Mesnikoff, director of the Sierra Club’s Green Transportation Campaign. “It is certainly time that we take a very close look at how we are moving freight and ensure that we do as much as possible to slash oil consumption, carbon pollution and the dangerous air pollution associated with freight.”

U.S. DOT didn’t need legislation to move forward on creating a national freight plan. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) urged LaHood to do so months ago, using his existing authority. But MAP-21, signed into law July 6, gave the agency the kick in the pants to get it done.

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Many states can use Health Impact Assessments to evaluate transportation projects, but few are doing so right now. Image: Health Impact Project

Transportation projects often have profound consequences for public health, whether negative (in the case of fossil fuel-burning highway expansions) or positive (in the case of calorie-burning bike-friendly, walkable streets). So why don’t cities and states always consider health impacts when evaluating a transportation project or policy?

That’s the question at the heart of a new paper released today by the Pew Health Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation [PDF], prepared by the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University.

The authors looked at the prevalence of “Health Impact Assessments,” which analyze the public health effects of a particular project or policy on a given population. Think of it as an Environmental Impact Statement, only the indicators are people, not ecosystems. HIAs are already used to inform policy decisions concerning health care or disease prevention, but they have also been used to evaluate transportation projects, like the East Bay Greenway. The HIA for the greenway influenced the design of the project, suggesting better integration with existing biking and walking paths, and helped to secure funding from Alameda County.

In some places, the report found, HIAs are already required in non-health policy sectors, while in others they are actually prohibited by law (though never for transportation). Most jurisdictions fall somewhere in between, with HIAs allowed but not mandated. (An EIS, on the other hand, is required by federal law for certain projects.)

The report does not evaluate the effectiveness of HIAs. Rather, the authors suggest that where HIAs have been slow to take root, an understanding of the law can increase their importance:

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Sidewalks, bike lanes, traffic calming projects — they save lives. Not just by protecting cyclists and pedestrians (not to mention motorists), but by encouraging physical activity that leads to a healthy life.

How much will that new traffic calming project benefit society? A new tool from the World Health Organization puts a figure on it. Photo: Tom Fudge/KPBS

Of course, it can be hard to convince politicians to see things in those terms when it’s time to pony up for walking and biking infrastructure. That is the brilliance of this new tool from the World Health Organization.

The WHO, which is on a mission to rein in the worldwide epidemic of traffic deaths and injuries, has developed a tool that measures the health impacts of bike and pedestrian infrastructure projects, calculating cost-benefit analyses as well as the economic value of reduced mortality.

Of course you need to do a little advance preparation before using the tool. You’ll need to have a fair amount of information about local travel habits at your disposal. (For example, you’ll be prompted to estimate the percentage of people who currently take walking trips and the average length of the trip.) But it’s the type of info your local metro planning agency should have publicly available. Worst case scenario, you have to perform a survey.

The tool is recommended for planners and engineers as well as advocacy groups.

While health care costs for American companies have been skyrocketing, Quality Bicycle Products is spending less on health care, thanks in part to a wellness program that encourages employees to commute by bike. Image: QBP

One of the most talked-about presentations at this week’s National Bike Summit came from Jason Gaikowski, director of sales for the Bloomington, Minnesota-based wholesale distributor Quality Bicycle Products. Over the last several years, QBP has ramped up its employee health and wellness program, which includes incentives to bike to work. At a time when most employers are grappling with rising insurance premiums, a study by the company’s health insurance provider, HealthPartners [PDF], suggests the program has helped reduce QBP’s health care costs and increase employee productivity.

Gaikowski made the case that QBP’s example bears a lesson for the nation’s transportation policy makers: Investment in infrastructure that supports active transportation can help rein in the country’s skyrocketing health care costs.

While you probably want to take research on the health benefits of cycling commissioned by a bike company with a grain of salt, Gaikowski’s basic premise has already been embraced by the experts at the Centers for Disease Control. The QBP/HealthPartners case study adds some intriguing data about the potential impact of bike commuting on employee health and the corporate bottom line, and it suggests some areas ripe for further study.

As part of its wellness program, QBP offers a few inducements for employees to commute by bike: The company provides secure parking and showers at work, and it pays employees $3 each day they ride to work. The cash payments add up to about $45,000 each year.

While the study doesn’t isolate the impact of bike commuting on lower health care costs, the program seems to be paying off. HealthPartners reported that participants in the “Bike to Work” program (about 100 of QBP’s 464 employees) cost approximately $200,000 less per year in health care claims annually, based on a comparison with employees who don’t participate in the program.

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