Car time adds to stress, study says

MODESTO BEE

The more time people spend behind the wheel, the more likely they are to become stressed, overweight and dead.

But more time in cars is exactly what we can look forward to in the San Joaquin Valley, California’s fastest growing region, where road improvements are not keeping pace and where residential planning decisions don’t always consider health.

“If you’re moving to Modesto, your housing options would be single-family house or single-family house, take your choice,” said Christopher Leinberger, a developer, professor and fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. “Your option to buy some bread would be to drive to a strip mall built in the ’80s or ’90s, take your choice.”

A trip like that — mandatory for most in a car-dependent culture — requires a lot more time these days than it did, say, 10 years ago. Almost any drive, whether to work or chauffeuring kids to soccer games, takes considerably longer on most valley routes. People change routines to run errands during nonpeak hours, or settle in for longer drives and more headaches.

And more driving, study after study confirms, means more pollution, more money for gas, less time with family and more chances for crashes.

Leinberger’s book, “The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream,” due out in two weeks, urges more walkable communities. Analysts for years have pointed to post-World War II national policies that set up history’s first generations almost entirely dependent on road travel for many of life’s necessities.

“The modern America of obesity, inactivity, depression and loss of community has not ’happened’ to us. We legislated, subsidized and planned it this way,” according to “Urban Sprawl and Public Health.”