A majority of infrastructure in the US makes it extremely hard to be healthy. Activity and healthy foods isn’t integrated into daily life. For example, you can’t just walk to the grocery store or other things in most places. And if you live in a bad neighborhood, you can’t feel safe going walking or running. Living in a walkable, safe, and nice area is out of reach for a lot of people. This makes it hard for people when activity isn’t the default.
There's also seems to be a cultural stigma against walking, although I don't know how widespread it is. When I lived in California, people would actually laugh at me for walking places. "Only homeless people walk", I was told.
There also is the the mental trap of what I call "car think" which happens to me whenever I have a car readily available. Distances that were no problem walking creepingly become unimaginable as the (contestable) comfort of a readily available car gets normalized. I can only imagine that this effect gets worse when it's your own car with "sunk cost" as part of the equation. I'm always happy when I get back to "city normal". Walking is awesome.
The good thing about cities is they make parking so freaking annoying, expensive, hazardous (small parking spaces) and time consuming that walking becomes much more tolerable.
Downside to walking is a weekly family shop isn't easy to carry around.
Nah, it’s a benefit. You need to store less, less goes to waste because it’s easier to see everything. You can buy fresher things that spoil quickly because you’re going to eat them right away.
The trick is that you pick stuff up “on your way home”, you aren’t making extra dedicated trips. Not hard to supplement with grocery deliveries these days either.
When I think back to the weekly grocery shopping I did with my parents as a kid? Those huge carts full of food, having to cover the entire store, then hauling it amd packing it in the car, then all the unpacking and organizing sorting and storing some of it in the main fridge and some in the backup fridge some in the pantry … to me that seems like way more hassle than speading the work out.
I have kids, tried different systems, more and smaller trips works for us. Probably it’s one of those things that everyone works out differently
Storing things either in the pantry or the freezer (meats/butter/etc) is the only way to take advantage of sales. Plus, it's smart emergency preparedness to have a week or two's worth of food in your house.
It takes me approximately 8 minutes to go roundtrip to the closest grocery store to me. 5 minutes if I can get what I need at a bodega-y place (so no produce, but still milk and snackfood).
it's the other way around for me. out in the suburbs a grocery run was around an hour, driving to the mall, navigating the ridiculously large hypermarket, packing the boot, driving back.
right now i live a block down from a grocery store and a grocery run is 15 minutes tops.
because grocery shopping was such a hassle in the suburbs we did it once a week and tried to buy as much as possible to avoid going back. in the city i just grab whatever is on my list walking home from the train station.
Well, they kind of do. Try to cram more spaces into a car park, and make the ramps and access points narrower. A car is a car, but the tolerances get shrunk. You do 6 point turns and suchlike.
Anything less than 1.5 miles is walkable in a reasonable amount of time, at least to me - that comes out to about a 30-45 minute "commute." The problem is that everything is so spread out (there's not that much to walk _to_), and walking paths are not guaranteed to all destinations within that distance (walking isn't even safe).
I wish American towns and cities were built in the traditional 4-over-1 style of places like Amsterdam, so that even in densely populated areas there was room for shops and restaurants that could survive off of foot traffic. When visiting old European cities not built around automotive infrastructure, it was so easy to get 5+ miles of walking in every day because everything is so close together.
Having a car is awesome also when you need it, like going grocery shopping in the rain. But having to depend on a car with no other reasonable options really sucks.
Easily within most of San Francisco. It boils down to the neighborhood you live in, but a bus or streetcar can augment the trip. The downside of doing it that way is that then you also have to endure MUNI and depending on the time of the day it can feel taxing, so it’s better if you live in one of the neighborhoods that already has a good market street (e.g. Clement & Geary in the Inner Richmond).
I live in a SoCal coastal city of 60K which has a fairly low "walk score" of 43. The services I'd need on a regular basis are in the neighborhood of a 20-45m walk (one way).
When I lived in a more car-centric city in the US, I used to get honked at while walking. It was a thing in this city to honk and/or yell at pedestrians. I’m not sure what the thinking behind that sort of behavior is.
My next-door neighbor here in California seemed kind of shocked when I told her I walked to the movie theater. It's 2 miles away, with a safe sidewalk.
Ive had people throw cans and shout at me while walking. Never understood why. Your comment brings it together for me after so many years. I wasn't homeless, just didn't have a car at the time and was used to walking long distances where I came from.
Has this gotten worse in the last 20 years, though? I think it was similarly bad around 2000, and yet, Americans have gotten less healthy over that period.
> A majority of infrastructure in the US makes it extremely hard to be healthy
This is a copout.The only hard thing about being healthy is having the discipline to do so. Certainly more than 6.8% of people have the means to have healthy diet and they choose not to. There are definitely extreme cases of poverty where it would be difficult (which people who are well above that will use as an example to make themselves feel better about their choices) but I'd argue it's still very reasonable to be able to lead a very healthy lifestyle.
We're fat as hell because we live a life of extreme abundance.
It’s not a cop out, it’s part of the variety of problems. Environment design can encourage certain habits and lifestyles. I agree that living an extreme life of abundance is also part of the problem. Though it’s definitely not the only cause.
And yet you see no obese person around in San Francisco. It’s better to expect people to not be disciplined and have a nice environment where they can have a healthy lifestyle by accident.
This may be coming from a privileged position, but I don't get the "bad neighbourhood" thing (I can also run quite fast and am generally fit and healthy, so that's also a factor). I'm also based in Australia, so our idea of "bad neighbourhood" might not even be a blip on the US scale of "bad neighbourhood".
I was working in Melbourne, staying near St. Kilda, and was told by some colleagues "don't go down street X at night", so I went down street X at night, had a nice meal there, walked back, no fucking worries at all.
Next morning I heard on the news that someone had been stabbed to death on that street within half an hour of my being out and about there.
The thing is, though, if you're not out causing trouble or selling drugs or buying drugs, or a member of the various competing underworlds, then you're likely to be totally fine. The stabbing was drug related.
It's a bad neighborhood if you're part of what makes it a bad neighborhood - in this case, at least.
I grew up in a bad neighborhood in the US and this is what it meant for us: hearing gun shots every other night, experiencing drive by’s at school, frequent helicopters looking for someone, swat team locking down our neighborhood and evacuating everyone, break-ins multiple times, being threatened at knife point by a random stranger, people putting our dumpsters on fire. Lack of opportunity because everyone around us is poor and in the same situation. No sidewalks, roads in bad condition, shitty schools.
We weren’t part of the problem, we were just kids. But it’s easy to get pulled in when you grow up like that. There’s a big difference between visiting or driving through and growing up in such a place where you feel like you always had to watch your back. Because you spend more time in such a place, it increases your chances of bad things happening.
But it also meant, playing around the streets with the neighborhood kids, great food, neighbors giving each other things like food and essentials, a sort of camaraderie that we had each other’s back. Not everything was bad. However, you never feel truly safe.
Beyond “grabbing a bite to eat“ being a very different level risk than going out to physically exhaust yourself on foot daily, violent crime per capita in the us is several multiples higher than it is in Australia on average, and it’s not remotely evenly distributed. The place most commonly cited as the most dangerous in Australia is Rockhampton in Queensland and the only numbers I could find were from 10 years ago— 2 murders per 100k, and apparently that’s dropped considerably. By contrast, St. Louis Missouri has about four times as many people and their murder rate is about 68 per 100k. St. Louis has about the same number of murders per year as Australia on a whole. I am quite certain that your experience in a rough neighborhood in Australia is not representative of many of our rough neighborhoods here.
Feeling safe is just as important as actually being safe.
I think you partially addressed that already with the privilege part. I know my city has rough areas that definitely have an increased risk of getting mugged, robbed or just jumped for no reason. Knowing that is enough to keep me from going around there unless I have a reason.
Yeah, most people who say parts of a city are "too dangerous to walk around" are overblown, especially in major cities. There are a few cities with a few areas where you probably don't want to be walking around if you don't know the area and the people. But, 90% of the time it's just that it's an immigrant area and people are afraid of difference.
And if you think from an environmental and practical perspective: Car-centric infrastructure cause more cars and more traffic jams, with more and more pollution.
There needs to be good frequent public transport on dedicated rails or priority lanes, so it is faster than a car can be. Good bicycle infrastructure so people want to take the bike. It's crazy that many people see cycling as some kind of sport or free time activity, while it is for so many people a serious way to commute to work or get the groceries or visit family.
But it is so cultural, so embedded in society, it is probably never going to be fixed. Also probably thanks to the motorvehicle lobby.
It's also that in many places things have been built to enormous widths (with huge parking lots) but low heights. I hated living in Mountain View as walks were cumbersome. On the other hand I loved moving down to Santa Monica later where things tended to be much closer together, making walkability a real thing (which was in fact easier/more convenient than driving, at least in the downtown cores).
Exactly. Environment design can alter behaviors. If there’s a grocery store near me but no sidewalks, I have to cross a huge intersection, and there’s sketchy spaces — that’s not a good pedestrian experience at all.
Yes and no, people get stuck in economic traps of paying for things they didn't really need, and those can eliminate all free time. Also, there really is a large group of americans that still work multiple jobs and can't afford healthcare, thats a thing. Some of those are physical jobs, but many are not.
Maybe, but many people in the world are able to stay healthy without having to make the time commitment or discipline of regular explicit exercise. It just falls out of living their regular lifestyles.
