6 ms·

Negative effects of driving and living near traffic

85 points by blondie9x 11y ago

suneilp 11y ago
Pretty much everything described in this article applies to other activities or lack thereof. We sitting in front of our computers too long or wearing out the couch too much eating potato chips. Exercise, or just a simple walk, is critical for our lives. It affects our outlook on life. We don't lack the ability to handle the busyness of modern life. We lack the priority of taking care of ourselves.
- hkmurakami 11y ago
  > We lack the priority of taking care of ourselves. We're definitely not wired to weigh long term consequences properly :(
  - fennecfoxen 11y ago
    If only there were some sort of venue where people could socialize some sort of set of shared values to connect the daily struggles of the individual in the present moment to the community, and to the future... a way to build stories around what it means to be a good human being, and to teach the next generation how to live a better life. we could call it something like, say, "organized religion". funny thing, though, it seems to get a bad rap on these pages more often than not :b for further reading, consider: http://www.amazon.com/Religion-Human-Evolution-Paleolithic-Axial/dp/0674061438 http://www.amazon.com/Religion-Human-Evolution-Paleolithic-A...
    - jqm 11y ago
      If only this venue thing you speak of hadn't been cutting off heads and burning at stakes and filling the pockets of fraudsters and promoting outrageous superstitions and unjust persecutions for the past several thousand years it might be worth investigating. As it is... it does indeed have a bad rap. Deservedly.
      - fennecfoxen 11y ago
        Oh, don't worry! These days we have plenty of other venues for filling the pockets of fraudsters and promoting unjust persecutions and the like. (Will have to get back to you about the beheadings, though - secular beheadings have been pretty minimal since the French revolution.)
      - kbutler 11y ago
        Can we nip the climate change religion in the bud? I hope you find these examples horrible regardless of your opinions on CO2-governed climate change. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFO0ayOz9FY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFO0ayOz9FY (Warning: This is a horrific video that shows climate change activists graphically executing children and others who disagree with the climate change orthodoxy. It was produced by the climate change activist group 1010uk to promote reduction of carbon dioxide emissions.) Or maybe we should only strangle doubters and "their kind" in their sleep (Joe Romm). Or just have trials with unspecified consequences (James Hansen). Persecution and execution are more strongly correlated with tribalism and ambition than religion. See French Revolution, Nazi-ism, high school, and internet comment forums. Religion is an excuse for persecution, not usually a cause.
    - Retra 11y ago
      See, you jumped to "organized religion" when you only needed to go as far as "organized." Not an uncommon mistake, but a mistake nonetheless.
- Hytosys 11y ago
  >Pretty much everything described in this article applies to other activities or lack thereof. Except the most poetic part of the article that recounts the results of heavy car traffic and lack of foot transportation — a huge negative impact on our sociology, not just on our physical health. I have become a proponent for walkable cities, public transportation reform, streets hidden from pedestrians, and narrow city roads. I'm extremely pessimistic about everyone else getting on board with these studies, though. People are quite proud of driving and their cars. We need to move forward and evolve transportation for the sake of our physical and mental health and for the sake of our society. I'm wondering how to get that national conversation started.
  - wpietri 11y ago
    I don't think it's essentially a national conversation. I think it has to be a thousand local conversations that borrow from one another. When people visit me in SF from more car-heavy areas, they're shocked to learn that I never have owned a car here. But by the time they've ridden our 4 mass transit networks, used a rental bike, taken a ferry, and gone with me somewhere in a CarShare car, it makes more sense. When they hear that I don't pay for car repairs or insurance or gas, they really start to get it. We got this over decades of local conversation and iteration, consciously borrowing from other cities like New York and Amsterdam. Other cities can do it too if they want. And I think many are. I hear lots of of good things about cities being increasingly friendly to pedestrians and cyclists.
colinshark 11y ago
I enjoy driving each morning, and it makes me happy. Sports car, windows down, cold air, a warmed up engine. Few things are better.
- D_Alex 11y ago
  Great, but - is there much, you know, traffic?
- andys627 11y ago
  The US is massively subsidizing this lifestyle and making it more attractive than elsewhere in the world. This is the only excuse for US style suburban sprawl vs similarly developed countries. We are massively subsidizing it by: -Not pricing in to user fees all costs of roads (especially over several life cycles of the road). This applies to highways but also local roads where infra in sprawly neighborhoods costs more than denser/centric neighborhoods but usually are paying same property tax rate -Not pricing in to user fees cost of resource security (oil) -Not pricing in to user fees all externalities of personal auto use on health care system - what is healthier our system or one where you have to walk a bit? -Mandating from the highest level an interstate highway system, the funding of which no common person understands (gas tax goes in and then distributed around country to pay for 90% of road project - why not local funding so people understand where the money comes from?) -We are not regulating green field development - we are letting developers build what they want because it makes the most money without asking how is the best way to build the city. Is the best way to build a city "leave it to the developers to build what makes them most money" ? -Our zoning is designed to separate stuff which makes cars the only option. Why does this matter? Because the government is choosing how we build our cities and they are choosing cars. It is not the free market. Check out Jeff Speck "Walkable City" for lots of facts, examples, and ways forward.
  - dsfyu404ed 11y ago
    The system that manages the money flow isn't perfect but we don't subsidize driving. I think you're confusing subsidizing it with taxing it like cigarettes. We don't discourage driving because that would discourage utilization of land that isn't located near a population center. Land is a natural resource that we can't practically use up (short of massively contaminating it) and to discourage its use would be moronic.
guuiijvhiubf 11y ago
I look forward to electric (and autonomous) cars for air quality alone. As a dedicated pedestrian fewer cars on the street will directly translate into an improved quality of life. It would be amazing if heavily urban areas would dedicate even larger spaces as car free.
- wlesieutre 11y ago
  Autonomous cars won't do much more than cabs for reducing the number of cars on the street, will they? They'd mostly reduce the number of cars sitting unused in driveways at any given time, but you still have just as many people who need to get from A to B.
  - stephengillie 11y ago
    I think a lot of us are quietly hoping the Auto-car will lead to some sort of CarBNB outcome, where the car can be scheduled by almost anyone when it's available. The car's owner is just another passenger, except maybe they can bump another's schedule and call the car to them on demand.
    - jschwartzi 11y ago
      I'm more interested in Car-as-a-Service. Basically, I pay a monthly fee for car access from a fleet in my metro area. When I need a car, I text a pickup and dropoff address to dispatch, which runs the numbers and sends me an eta. If I know I'll be making a trip ahead of time, I can bid for an appointment though a web or app interface which lets me see what prices will likely win for certain time slots and trips. That way dispatch can optimize fleet size, travel time, and eta by charging a monthly fee for system maintenance plus trip fees for each trip. All it has to do is be cheaper than what I pay now to maintain my own vehicle.
      - stephengillie 11y ago
        And will the fleet be owned and operated by a central authority? Or will it be several independent networks of car owners?
sandworm101 11y ago
>> Walking 30 minutes a day— [...] lowers the risk of heart disease by up to 40%, reduces the risk of Type II diabetes by as much as 60%, and can cut the risk of stroke by a third. Can we please stop with this "Walking 30 minutes" ridiculousness. Yes it is correct, but only if you compare the 30-minute walkers with shutins or elderly people who rarely if ever get out of their chairs. Most of us already get far more than 30-minutes of far more vigorous exercise. I did 45 minutes in the pool today (2.75km) spent an hour walking my dog, and dealt with numerous stairs ramps and other not-sitting things. I'm not anything I would call "in shape" but would another 30 minutes of walking really reduce my diabetes risk by 40%? I think not. So stop telling us that extra 30-minutes of barely moving will make a hoot of difference.
- veidr 11y ago
  Hmm, you did 45 minutes in the pool, so the physical benefits of walking probably would be less in your case. Perhaps a leisurely 30 minute walk would make you less irritable, though? ;-)
  - cylinder 11y ago
    Oh yeah, walking definitely calms yllll
- dasil003 11y ago
  I agree it's sort of grating and trite to hear these articles throwing out some random numbers chosen from a bell curve for their journalistic impact and then touted abstractly. However, I've also just got back from living three years in London, and compared to living in 3 American cities and one Brazilian city, I can tell you the difference of living in a truly pedestrian friendly city with solid multi-modal transport options leads to a lot more walking, and I felt the health benefits of this. Even considering that I cycle commuted in all of the aforementioned cities, just the convenience of not needing a car (nor uber or taxis for that matter) led to a lot more walking above and beyond my natural recreational activity which I would find a way to do anywhere I lived. It's hard to quantify, but it's very very real. In the US there are very few places where you can live and not feel severely restricted without a car—you can do it in New York, and you can sort of get away with it in SF (although a lot of people's lifestyles would collapse if they had to give up their Uber and Lyft to instead rely on Muni)—but most places metros are tiny or non-existent, and buses are primarily used by the poor and have terrible service. There's no doubt in my mind that this has huge impacts on public health, but of course it's impossible to isolate the effect and quantify it since countries that do these things differently have all sorts of confounding cultural differences.
veidr 11y ago
I think the key point here (which the author kind of dances around) is that walking puts you in a different kind of mental mode. He writes, "walking makes me smarter". This jibes with my experiences when I started walking 5+ miles a day (that was before I had young kids that absorbed every minute of free time). I felt like it did make me smarter. Or at least, better at programming and writing. I now commute by bicycle, and I think that is somewhere on the spectrum between driving and walking. But even on a bicycle, you have to be in "collision avoidance mode" pretty much continuously. Your mind still wanders -- but with a lot more interruptions and alerts. I think there is something "magic" about walking -- by which I mean something great, but something that we may not be able to scientifically understand in my lifetime. We know we evolved to walk upright, and we can measure a lot of the physical health benefits it confers, but we still don't know enough about the brain to prove that it benefits cognition, happiness, satisfaction, etc. I strongly suspect that it does, though.
- cylinder 11y ago
  I walk to work in Manhattan. Definitely always in collision avoidance mode or stressing about something else, like all the clouds of God knows what kind of dust coming from the drywall and other remnants of interior demolition being recklessly loaded into garbage trucks. And I'm choking on the fumes of all the cars that shouldn't be there. Ideally, I'd walk a mile to work through a forest, nature trail, or a large park.
- anon4 11y ago
  Yeah, there's definitely the fact that you have to be on alert on most roads. However, you do always have the option of getting off and walking if that's what suits you, pushing the bike with you. You can't really get off your car and tug it behind you on the sidewalk :) .
- majordouchebag 11y ago
  walking is easy and relaxing so you have time to think. "makes you smarter" is only temporary. Blood flow is key.

85 points by blondie9x 11y ago

Pretty much everything described in this article applies to other activities or lack thereof. We sitting in front of our computers too long or wearing out the couch too much eating potato chips. Exercise, or just a simple walk, is critical for our lives. It affects our outlook on life. We don't lack the ability to handle the busyness of modern life. We lack the priority of taking care of ourselves.

hkmurakami 11y ago
> We lack the priority of taking care of ourselves. We're definitely not wired to weigh long term consequences properly :(
- fennecfoxen 11y ago
  If only there were some sort of venue where people could socialize some sort of set of shared values to connect the daily struggles of the individual in the present moment to the community, and to the future... a way to build stories around what it means to be a good human being, and to teach the next generation how to live a better life. we could call it something like, say, "organized religion". funny thing, though, it seems to get a bad rap on these pages more often than not :b for further reading, consider: http://www.amazon.com/Religion-Human-Evolution-Paleolithic-Axial/dp/0674061438 http://www.amazon.com/Religion-Human-Evolution-Paleolithic-A...
  - jqm 11y ago
    If only this venue thing you speak of hadn't been cutting off heads and burning at stakes and filling the pockets of fraudsters and promoting outrageous superstitions and unjust persecutions for the past several thousand years it might be worth investigating. As it is... it does indeed have a bad rap. Deservedly.
    - fennecfoxen 11y ago
      Oh, don't worry! These days we have plenty of other venues for filling the pockets of fraudsters and promoting unjust persecutions and the like. (Will have to get back to you about the beheadings, though - secular beheadings have been pretty minimal since the French revolution.)
    - kbutler 11y ago
      Can we nip the climate change religion in the bud? I hope you find these examples horrible regardless of your opinions on CO2-governed climate change. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFO0ayOz9FY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFO0ayOz9FY (Warning: This is a horrific video that shows climate change activists graphically executing children and others who disagree with the climate change orthodoxy. It was produced by the climate change activist group 1010uk to promote reduction of carbon dioxide emissions.) Or maybe we should only strangle doubters and "their kind" in their sleep (Joe Romm). Or just have trials with unspecified consequences (James Hansen). Persecution and execution are more strongly correlated with tribalism and ambition than religion. See French Revolution, Nazi-ism, high school, and internet comment forums. Religion is an excuse for persecution, not usually a cause.
  - Retra 11y ago
    See, you jumped to "organized religion" when you only needed to go as far as "organized." Not an uncommon mistake, but a mistake nonetheless.
Hytosys 11y ago
>Pretty much everything described in this article applies to other activities or lack thereof. Except the most poetic part of the article that recounts the results of heavy car traffic and lack of foot transportation — a huge negative impact on our sociology, not just on our physical health. I have become a proponent for walkable cities, public transportation reform, streets hidden from pedestrians, and narrow city roads. I'm extremely pessimistic about everyone else getting on board with these studies, though. People are quite proud of driving and their cars. We need to move forward and evolve transportation for the sake of our physical and mental health and for the sake of our society. I'm wondering how to get that national conversation started.
- wpietri 11y ago
  I don't think it's essentially a national conversation. I think it has to be a thousand local conversations that borrow from one another. When people visit me in SF from more car-heavy areas, they're shocked to learn that I never have owned a car here. But by the time they've ridden our 4 mass transit networks, used a rental bike, taken a ferry, and gone with me somewhere in a CarShare car, it makes more sense. When they hear that I don't pay for car repairs or insurance or gas, they really start to get it. We got this over decades of local conversation and iteration, consciously borrowing from other cities like New York and Amsterdam. Other cities can do it too if they want. And I think many are. I hear lots of of good things about cities being increasingly friendly to pedestrians and cyclists.

colinshark 11y ago

I enjoy driving each morning, and it makes me happy. Sports car, windows down, cold air, a warmed up engine. Few things are better.

D_Alex 11y ago
Great, but - is there much, you know, traffic?
andys627 11y ago
The US is massively subsidizing this lifestyle and making it more attractive than elsewhere in the world. This is the only excuse for US style suburban sprawl vs similarly developed countries. We are massively subsidizing it by: -Not pricing in to user fees all costs of roads (especially over several life cycles of the road). This applies to highways but also local roads where infra in sprawly neighborhoods costs more than denser/centric neighborhoods but usually are paying same property tax rate -Not pricing in to user fees cost of resource security (oil) -Not pricing in to user fees all externalities of personal auto use on health care system - what is healthier our system or one where you have to walk a bit? -Mandating from the highest level an interstate highway system, the funding of which no common person understands (gas tax goes in and then distributed around country to pay for 90% of road project - why not local funding so people understand where the money comes from?) -We are not regulating green field development - we are letting developers build what they want because it makes the most money without asking how is the best way to build the city. Is the best way to build a city "leave it to the developers to build what makes them most money" ? -Our zoning is designed to separate stuff which makes cars the only option. Why does this matter? Because the government is choosing how we build our cities and they are choosing cars. It is not the free market. Check out Jeff Speck "Walkable City" for lots of facts, examples, and ways forward.
- dsfyu404ed 11y ago
  The system that manages the money flow isn't perfect but we don't subsidize driving. I think you're confusing subsidizing it with taxing it like cigarettes. We don't discourage driving because that would discourage utilization of land that isn't located near a population center. Land is a natural resource that we can't practically use up (short of massively contaminating it) and to discourage its use would be moronic.

guuiijvhiubf 11y ago

I look forward to electric (and autonomous) cars for air quality alone. As a dedicated pedestrian fewer cars on the street will directly translate into an improved quality of life. It would be amazing if heavily urban areas would dedicate even larger spaces as car free.

wlesieutre 11y ago
Autonomous cars won't do much more than cabs for reducing the number of cars on the street, will they? They'd mostly reduce the number of cars sitting unused in driveways at any given time, but you still have just as many people who need to get from A to B.
- stephengillie 11y ago
  I think a lot of us are quietly hoping the Auto-car will lead to some sort of CarBNB outcome, where the car can be scheduled by almost anyone when it's available. The car's owner is just another passenger, except maybe they can bump another's schedule and call the car to them on demand.
  - jschwartzi 11y ago
    I'm more interested in Car-as-a-Service. Basically, I pay a monthly fee for car access from a fleet in my metro area. When I need a car, I text a pickup and dropoff address to dispatch, which runs the numbers and sends me an eta. If I know I'll be making a trip ahead of time, I can bid for an appointment though a web or app interface which lets me see what prices will likely win for certain time slots and trips. That way dispatch can optimize fleet size, travel time, and eta by charging a monthly fee for system maintenance plus trip fees for each trip. All it has to do is be cheaper than what I pay now to maintain my own vehicle.
    - stephengillie 11y ago
      And will the fleet be owned and operated by a central authority? Or will it be several independent networks of car owners?

sandworm101 11y ago

>> Walking 30 minutes a day— [...] lowers the risk of heart disease by up to 40%, reduces the risk of Type II diabetes by as much as 60%, and can cut the risk of stroke by a third. Can we please stop with this "Walking 30 minutes" ridiculousness. Yes it is correct, but only if you compare the 30-minute walkers with shutins or elderly people who rarely if ever get out of their chairs. Most of us already get far more than 30-minutes of far more vigorous exercise. I did 45 minutes in the pool today (2.75km) spent an hour walking my dog, and dealt with numerous stairs ramps and other not-sitting things. I'm not anything I would call "in shape" but would another 30 minutes of walking really reduce my diabetes risk by 40%? I think not. So stop telling us that extra 30-minutes of barely moving will make a hoot of difference.

veidr 11y ago
Hmm, you did 45 minutes in the pool, so the physical benefits of walking probably would be less in your case. Perhaps a leisurely 30 minute walk would make you less irritable, though? ;-)
- cylinder 11y ago
  Oh yeah, walking definitely calms yllll
dasil003 11y ago
I agree it's sort of grating and trite to hear these articles throwing out some random numbers chosen from a bell curve for their journalistic impact and then touted abstractly. However, I've also just got back from living three years in London, and compared to living in 3 American cities and one Brazilian city, I can tell you the difference of living in a truly pedestrian friendly city with solid multi-modal transport options leads to a lot more walking, and I felt the health benefits of this. Even considering that I cycle commuted in all of the aforementioned cities, just the convenience of not needing a car (nor uber or taxis for that matter) led to a lot more walking above and beyond my natural recreational activity which I would find a way to do anywhere I lived. It's hard to quantify, but it's very very real. In the US there are very few places where you can live and not feel severely restricted without a car—you can do it in New York, and you can sort of get away with it in SF (although a lot of people's lifestyles would collapse if they had to give up their Uber and Lyft to instead rely on Muni)—but most places metros are tiny or non-existent, and buses are primarily used by the poor and have terrible service. There's no doubt in my mind that this has huge impacts on public health, but of course it's impossible to isolate the effect and quantify it since countries that do these things differently have all sorts of confounding cultural differences.

veidr 11y ago

I think the key point here (which the author kind of dances around) is that walking puts you in a different kind of mental mode. He writes, "walking makes me smarter". This jibes with my experiences when I started walking 5+ miles a day (that was before I had young kids that absorbed every minute of free time). I felt like it did make me smarter. Or at least, better at programming and writing. I now commute by bicycle, and I think that is somewhere on the spectrum between driving and walking. But even on a bicycle, you have to be in "collision avoidance mode" pretty much continuously. Your mind still wanders -- but with a lot more interruptions and alerts. I think there is something "magic" about walking -- by which I mean something great, but something that we may not be able to scientifically understand in my lifetime. We know we evolved to walk upright, and we can measure a lot of the physical health benefits it confers, but we still don't know enough about the brain to prove that it benefits cognition, happiness, satisfaction, etc. I strongly suspect that it does, though.

cylinder 11y ago
I walk to work in Manhattan. Definitely always in collision avoidance mode or stressing about something else, like all the clouds of God knows what kind of dust coming from the drywall and other remnants of interior demolition being recklessly loaded into garbage trucks. And I'm choking on the fumes of all the cars that shouldn't be there. Ideally, I'd walk a mile to work through a forest, nature trail, or a large park.
anon4 11y ago
Yeah, there's definitely the fact that you have to be on alert on most roads. However, you do always have the option of getting off and walking if that's what suits you, pushing the bike with you. You can't really get off your car and tug it behind you on the sidewalk :) .
majordouchebag 11y ago
walking is easy and relaxing so you have time to think. "makes you smarter" is only temporary. Blood flow is key.