Birbla

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  • All I could glean from the abstract is that people walk more in walkable cities.
    by cadamsdotcom
  • I'm confused. Usually a "natural experiment" is a chance event that affects some random subset of a population. Here, they seem to be using "natural experiment" to refer to the event that someone decides to move to a different city. But obviously the subset of people in Amarilllo, TX who decide to move to New York, NY are going to be somewhat different than the subset who don't. So isn't this confounded?

    It's really strange that they just jump into the paper and keep saying "natural experiment" over and over again without any justification that they actually have one. They do eventually get to this in the "Selection effects in relocation and mobile app usage" section, but I think they really downplay the seriousness of the issue.

    by dynm
  • I think they were claiming that people who move to certain cities increase their activity after moving, regardless of where they come from.
    by jt2190
  • This is broken at the top and bottom. Your elected representatives don't know that a bicycle network even exists. Safer roads for cars are their only transportation priority.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bicycle_Route_Sy...

    by 1970-01-01
  • Wow. It’s fun to compare the US bicycle routes to the bicycle routes in the Netherlands.

    Here’s the first Wikipedia photo of USBR 1:

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Bicycle_Route_1#/media/...

    Look, it’s a road on which is possible, but not necessarily desirable, to ride a bike.

    The Netherlands has at least two systems:

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LF-routes

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbered-node_cycle_network

    and neither article emphasizes the dramatic difference between these and the US system, possibly because it’s utterly obvious to anyone who has ever used the Dutch system: the Dutch bike routes are far, far higher quality. You can bike from almost anywhere to almost anywhere with the bulk of the route (at least outside of a city center) on paths are well separated from cars or even nowhere near a road at all. A lot of them even separate pedestrians from bikes or separate fast bikes from slow bikes. Even the worse bike paths are better than most bike paths in the US. If you ride the bike paths to a major store or a mall, you will generally find that the dedicated bike parking is closer than the car parking. If you go to a smaller store, a cafe or a house, you will be able to get from the nearest bike path to the building without crossing a traffic lane. If you go to a busy area, you might find a double decker bike parking lot!

    This works well in a country with more bikes than people. Those paths are heavily utilized.

    The US has excellent bike paths as well, but they are largely the exception, not the norm, and the almost entirely fail to connect into a cohesive system on which you can safely bike from point A to point B without ending up on nasty roads for large fractions of the trip.

    by amluto
  • I’d like to see a study like this for young kids. Anecdotally, I ran through the woods until I went to college and stress about the urban life I’m providing for my kids
    by allcentury
  • It might depend on what you mean by urban. Are there a lot of places your kids can walk to from your residence? I'm thinking of schools, parks, stores, etc. or are you in a place where they really have to be driven everywhere?
    by amanaplanacanal
  • It’s funny how as we increase a nations gdp, and general wealth, we commodify everything. day care, dog walkers, psychical activity, etc and then we have to go back and do all this market research and artificially recreate what was holistic about the more rural way of life.

    There really is no free lunch!

    by trainsarebetter
  • The places that they see people walking the most are places like New York or San Fransisco. In what way are these places rural?
    by abdullahkhalids
  • GDP doesn't represent much about output so much as how much money people pay for what outputs. It follows directly from this that if you want to increase GDP, you start commodifying activities that previously were not measured in economic terms, e.g. childcare, art, etc.
    by uoaei
  • It’s funny how in a society everything gets commodified to the point of commodifying what you previously got (for free) as a side-effect of the typical lifestyle? I don’t think that’s “funny” as in ironic or puzzling—I think it’s entirely freaking predictable.

    Be right back. I just have to look for a completely quiet treadmill for the open office where I spend my life.

    by keybored
  • I live in the most urban environment that exists in my country and get significantly more physical activity than the car-dependent rural dwellers in my family. As it is, I am almost 40 and have never owned a car, cities are great.
    by footy
  • Rural doesn't mean walkable, unless you mean either pre-automobile or physical jobs.
    by jerlam
  • It's not like those things weren't all getting done before. They just didn't generate commerce and didn't generate GDP. GDP goes up because of commodifying all those things. It's not clear if it's actually more efficient this way though.
    by potato3732842