The Sprawl Effect

"A strip mall here, a housing development there, an industrial park yonder, all connected by roads, leave little room for pedestrians. In the September issue of the American Journal of Health Promotion, Reid Ewing, a researcher at the University of Maryland, surveyed 448 counties in the United States and found that rates of hypertension and obesity were proportional to the sprawl index -- a measurement that takes into account population density, number of highways and distances between homes and businesses. In Burnside, for instance, wide suburban houses are built on cul-de-sacs, and the absence of local shops rules out what experts call purposeful walking. Movement has been engineered out of our lives..."