Switching gears

September 16, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Study correlates walking, cycling and obesity levels

McClatchy Newspapers

HACKENSACK, N.J.

A Rutgers transportation expert says the United States could solve part of its obesity problem by making it easier for people to bike or walk where they need to go.

John Pucher analyzed data from 15 countries, 50 states and 47 of the nation’s largest cities for a relationship between “active travel” — the kind that doesn’t rely upon motorized vehicles — and health.

Not surprisingly, he found that communities where people cycle and walk more in daily life have less obesity and diabetes than those where people rely on cars to get around. That was true at all three geographic levels, he said in a study called “Walking and Cycling to Health: A Comparative Analysis of City, State and International Data.”

The study focused on travel to work and to do errands, not recreational bike-riding or walking. In some European countries, such non-recreational trips are three to five times more common than they are in the United States, the study found.

In the Netherlands, Switzerland and Spain, for example, people bike, walk or use mass transit for nearly half of all their trips. “Women and men, old and young, men in suits, they’re all biking,” said Pucher. “They even deliver the mail by bike.”

They also have the lowest rates of obesity — just 8 percent in each of those three countries.

In the United States, on the other hand, Americans cycle, walk or use mass transit for 11 percent of trips, and in many states far less than that. (Mass-transit use is considered “active travel” because 95 percent of such trips involve walking or biking to or from the station.) And obesity rates in the U.S. average 26 percent, more than three times higher than in the European countries studied.

Among the 50 states, Pucher said, “The very highest levels of obesity are found in exactly those states that have the lowest level of biking, walking and public-transit use.” Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee lead the nation in obesity, at 31 to 33 percent, and lag in walking and cycling, at 1.4 to 2.3 percent of all trips.

And the single biggest trend in American travel behavior over the past decade, he notes, is the sharp decline in the number of children walking and biking to school, which has occurred at a time when obesity rates among children have skyrocketed.

Proving cause and effect is impossible, “but you have this interesting relationship,” said Pucher, a professor at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University.

Pucher lives his research: He doesn’t own a car. He commutes to the Rutgers campus in New Brunswick by bike five months of the year and on foot the rest of the time.

“Yes, even in Central Jersey it is possible to be car-free,” he said. “But it’s not easy!”

New Jersey residents are among the least likely in the United States to bike to work: just 0.3 percent of commuting trips are by bike, compared with the national average of 0.5 percent, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But more people walk to work — 3.2 percent — than the national average, perhaps because of the many cities and small towns.

More than 60 percent of New Jersey’s population is overweight and 24 percent obese.

Ron Bienstock of Fair Lawn, N.J., who rides to his Hackensack, N.J., law office two or three days a week during good weather, is one of the few bikers.

He carries his work clothes in a backpack and takes roughly double the time by bike that it would take by car.

At night, he said, “I try to be like a movable Christmas tree, with all the lights I keep on.” Besides flashing lights and a headlight on his bike, he wears a reflective jacket and reflective patches on his pack.

Not a single road on any of his routes has a bike lane. And he never sees another bike commuter.