My bike is not taking me on a weight loss journey.
I’d like to get something off my chest. It’s something I see pop up all the time regarding walkable or pedestrian- and cycling-friendly cities: This idea that you’ll be skinnier if you could just walk everywhere.
I got to thinking about this as I was reading Daniel Knowles book, Carmageddon. The title isn’t subtle, but in case you were confused, the subtitle is “How Cars Make Life Worse and What To Do About It.” So far, I’m on board.
It was an OK read; it has no notes, no bibliography, so not a book designed to help you learn more. But if you want to rip me right out of the argument that cars are bad for society, just start talking about health and weight.
Human health - what causes good and bad outcomes - is astoundingly complex. What we can say about the population at large isn’t the same as what we can say for individual people. Knowles, to his credit, doesn’t linger on health much. But I would like to quote a particular passage at length because it’s so smug and judge-y while ostensibly trying to not be smug and judge-y:
Walking and cycling are not only convenient, and often cheaper, but they are also much healthier than sitting still behind the wheel of a car. We live in increasingly sedentary societies. a 2010 survey by the Centers for Disease Control found that 38 percent of Americans say that they have not walked for more than ten minutes at a time in more than a week. At a typical walking pace, that means that more than a third of people have not walked half a mile in a week. The average Briton walks only around half a mile per day to get anywhere (so, not counting walking from the sofa to the fridge), or 181 miles a year, according to the Department of Transport. That is down by 83 miles since 1986. And so it should hardly be a surprise that we are getting fatter. Around 28 percent of Brits are clinically obese, and another 35 percent are overweight. In America, 41 percent of people are obese, a figure that is higher still in states like Texas or Iowa, where almost everybody gets around by car.
Driving everywhere is not only making out cities ugly and polluted, it is also making us fatter. It’s easy to moralize about that , but it is mostly not because people are lazy that [sic] they do not exercise enough. It is because they follow the incentives society creates. And those incentives are to drive everywhere, rather than walk. Our ancestors did not spend much time in the gym, or even eat especially healthy diets, but they stayed slim because their day-to-day habits involved walking. It would do us good to rediscover that.
Carmageddon, pp 184-185
Where do I even start? I guess start with the low-hanging fruit: that parenthetical in the first paragraph. The one about not counting the distance walking from the sofa to the fridge? Real nice. Makes the entire second paragraph look awfully disingenuous. But that’s not even the worst problem.
This is basically hand-wringing for 3/4 of a page about how fat people are. But so what? What is the harm here? I’m not going to reinvent the wheel and instead drop this episode of Maintenance Phase to get you up to speed on all things obesity, but suffice it to say that obesity doesn’t equal death. Or even guarantee bad health outcomes. It’s sloppy to equate being a certain weight with being healthy.
That is not to say that argument for more pedestrian- and cyclist-friendly streets should ignore health. Walking is good for everyone. It’s good for your heart and your muscles and your bones. There’s evidence that it supports your mental health. That’s ignoring the impact of pollution of vehicles and injuries from vehicle crashes.
I don’t meant to put this book in particular on blast. This bullshit is so common. Like a recent NPR story on NEAT, or non-exercise activity thermogenesis. The article is interesting! The gist of it is that you can’t change a lot about how your body uses calories, but if you’re active during the day - SURPRISE! - you burn more calories. Toward the end of the article they talk about other positive health outcomes, but it’s overwhelmingly about how many calories you can burn and, implicitly, how much weight you can lose.
I’m just so tired of this framing. When I lived in a walkable and bikeable city, I didn’t lose any weight, but I felt so much better. I slept better. This is anecdotal, but there are more lasting and important reasons to want to get out of your car than fitting into those size 2 jeans.
