Advocating for Active Living in Your Community, Part 2

By Maya Mohan, Physical Activity Coordinator for the MA Department of Public Health

A couple of weeks ago I talked about how our environment can either help or hinder our ability to be active or eat healthfully. Today, I want to talk about two things you can do right now to assess your own environment: check out how “walkable” and “bikeable” they are.

“Walkability” and “bikeability” are phrases that refer to how safe, appealing and connected a neighborhood is for walking and biking, respectively. Safety and appeal are pretty self-explanatory, but let me explain what I mean by “connected.” It’s important that the roads and paths we walk and bike on are connected to public transportation, grocery stores, schools, parks, and places we do our everyday business, like the dry cleaners, post office, and banks, just to name a few.

Think about this… If you could walk or bike to get your kids to school (get them on their bikes too!), go to work, and run your errands instead of driving, you’d lower your carbon footprint, save money on gas/parking/tickets/other car related stuff, AND sneak in some good ole’ activity! In other words, a thoughtfully designed walkable and bikeable neighborhood not only impacts our health for the better, but can have positive economic and environmental effects as well.

Of course, there are whole career tracks and professions designed around making communities easier to walk and bike in, but there are a couple of really easy, informal audits that you and your family can do right in your own neighborhood. Today, even.

Check out these walkability and bikeability checklists. They are really easy to fill out - just 5 questions for the walkability one, and 7 for the bikeability list! After you fill out the checklist, you’ll see some steps that you can take right now to improve those conditions, and some steps that will take a little bit longer than “right now.” Get a bunch of friends together to do a few of these audits in different areas of your neighborhood. Then, try some of the short-, and long-term action steps listed at the end of the audits. And voila! You, my friend, are now becoming a walking and bicycling advocate in your own community!

WalkBoston and MassBike are two organizations that work hard to make sure our communities are walkable and bikeable. But they can’t do it alone. If each one of us took a small piece of our neighborhood, did one of these quick checklists and tried just one of the action steps… well, image the changes we could collectively make!

So, I urge you to pick a route that you walk or bike on a regular basis, take a friend along with you, and try one (or both!) of the checklists. Oh, and don’t forget to let me know how it goes!

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This post was originally published on the MA DPH blog, Commonwealth Conversations, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of MA DPH.