By Bryan Thompson, KPR

MANHATTAN — Obesity, diabetes, heart disease — these relentlessly increasing health issues aren’t really the problem in America, according to Mark Fenton, who spoke Wednesday at the third annual Kansas Obesity Summit. Rather, he said, the real culprits are poor nutrition and physical activity.

“Those are the epidemics that we really want to turn the tide on,” said Fenton, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology-trained engineer who specializes in community design as a way to improve public health. “We’d like to help people eat a better diet and be more physically active on a regular basis. And we know that just telling them to do that isn’t enough, but that we can build environments across the great state of Kansas and, in fact, across the country where it encourages people to make healthier choices.”
In a pre-summit interview, Fenton said it’s well-established that the built environment — roads, sidewalks, buildings and other community elements — affects people’s choice of travel and physical activity.

“There are cities and towns across Kansas that are re-evaluating whether they want to continue to widen their roads, or whether they’d like to add some bicycle lanes or improve or repair sidewalks that are missing,” said Fenton. “They’re rethinking their land-use decisions. Do we want to continue to sprawl out into our highest-quality farmland, or would we like to reinvest in our Main Streets and our downtowns and our existing neighborhoods? Do we want to rebuild the elementary school that served a neighborhood for decades, or do we want to abandon it and build a new school out on the edge of town, where every child will have to go there by car?

“Many communities are rethinking that and saying, you know, maybe that neighborhood school — where the majority of kids could walk and bike, and where the parents lived close enough by to get intimately involved with the school — was actually a better choice.”

Fenton said there’s a growing body of evidence that communities with more mixed-use and livable districts — neighborhoods that make it easier to walk and bike, maybe even incorporating bike parking in front of businesses — also are healthier economically.

“As we do, for example, those investments that make our Main Street more walkable again and more appealing, it also makes it easier for customers on one side of the street to walk across and shop at the stores on the other side,” he said. “They’ve actually got studies that show higher retail revenue and tax revenue in more walkable districts when they’ve made these kinds of improvements and repairs. You don’t have to be a hard-core health nut to want to do this stuff. We’re finding, for example, economic development officers and elected boards increasingly interested in the same principles.”

Fenton said housing values are higher, and held up better during the recent economic downturn, in neighborhoods where walking, biking and public transit are more convenient. But he cautioned that it’s not enough to build a walking trail and paint bike lanes on a couple of streets.

“If those bike lanes existed on a short segment of the road but they didn’t connect to a greater network, what good are they, right?” he asked. “I’m not going to drive my bike to ride one mile of road that’s got a bike lane on it and then get back into my car. We have to build a system or a network.”

Fenton said it’s unreasonable to expect people to walk or bike where it’s not safe to do so. But cities and towns in Kansas and across the country that have created safe networks for walking and biking are seeing growing volumes of pedestrian activity.

“Keep in mind, I’m not describing a world in which everybody’s going to just give up their car and become a nut-job cyclist tomorrow,” he said. “I believe it’s going to be a world where people have the option to walk or bike, walk a kid to school or walk to a corner store for some errands rather than get in their car for every trip. So I think that’s the important thing, that we understand we’re creating options, and that people indicate by their economic behavior they want those options.”