A new study should leave little doubt that pedestrian-friendly neighbourhoods produce healthy residents.

Prepared for the nonprofit Smart Growth B.C., the 60-page report, B.C. Sprawl Report: Walkability and Health 2009, provides solid empirical evidence of the direct link between urban planning and public health.

“We found that body weights and hypertension are higher in places that are less walkable,” principal author and Montreal-based urban-planning expert Ray Tomalty told the Georgia Straight by phone.

Researchers formulated two indices to measure the walkability of 16 neighbourhoods across the province, including one in Vancouver, that were selected for the study.

Using the 2006 census data as well as geographic-information-system software, they drew up an “objective walkability index” of factors like intersection density, presence of sidewalks, block lengths, and the like.

They also devised a “subjective walkability index” based on responses to a 2006 survey by the B.C. Provincial Health Services Authority, which asked people to assess their neighbourhoods on matters ranging from safety to the pleasantness of their surroundings.

The same survey asked respondents about their gender, age, income, weight, and height. Another question dealt with the number of days they had walked for more than 10 minutes over the previous week. Also, the survey asked whether they had hypertension or diabetes.

The study showed that “people living in more walkable neighbourhoods, regardless of age, income or gender, are more likely to walk for at least 10 minutes on a daily basis than those living in less walkable neighbourhoods.”

It also concluded that “as a neighbourhood becomes more walkable it is likely to have a lower incidence of obesity amongst its residents.”

These two findings were arrived at with a 99-percent significance level, meaning that the authors are “very confident that the observed relationship is a real one: there is only a one-percent likelihood that the correlation is due to chance”.

The study also established with a 95-percent confidence level that as the “objective walkability index” rises, the odds of a person suffering from hypertension decline. There was no significant statistical correlation made between walkability and diabetes.

One key lesson can be drawn from the study, according to Tomalty, principal of the Montreal consulting firm Co-operative Research and Policy Services.

“We should be building places that are walkable, and that means places with sidewalks, with tree cover, with streets that lead to places instead of into dead ends, and that have less car traffic on it,” Tomalty said in conversation. “We should be discouraging car use by any means that we can. We should be building cities that pay attention to the pedestrian landscape.”

An adjunct professor at McGill University, Tomalty also noted that municipal governments need to define new standards for their transportation planners.

“One of the major challenges that cities face is having to confront this culture of auto eroticism—the love of the automobile and free-flowing automobile traffic that you find in transportation departments,” he said.

The study suggested that public-health advocates get more involved in planning exercises for neighbourhoods, real-estate developments, recreation, and the like.

Tomalty and coauthor Murtaza Haider, a professor at Toronto’s Ryerson University, wrote that the theme of their study was inspired by the “growing recognition that the design of our communities are contributing to the increasing incidence of overweight and obesity in Canada”.

They noted that although public-health agencies are recommending at least 30 minutes of moderate exercise per day, walking and biking figure in only 12 percent of trips to work, school, and the store across the country.

The authors also pointed out that Canadians want more opportunities for “active transportation”. They cited a 1998 survey wherein eight in 10 Canadian adults indicated that they would like to walk more, while two of three respondents stated that they would like to do more biking.

Despite this inclination to walk and bike more, the study observed that reshaping neighbourhoods to make them more pedestrian-friendly has been “slow to materialize”.