A More Walkable World: Ideas to get us moving

0:00This message comes from AT &T. Staying connected matters. That's why AT &T has connectivity you can depend on. or they'll proactively make it right. That's the AT &T Guarantee. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com slash guarantee for details. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy?

0:44And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And I am walking. because today on the show, a more walkable world. Throughout the hour, ideas to get us moving more, from the latest in urban planning to walking as a form of protest and even as an act of kindness. But first, a story about the project we did last fall with a lot of listeners. It was called Body Electric, and it started with a little history lesson because there was a time, long ago, when humans ran and walked everywhere. Humans kind of had the body that they needed to be able to move, and the African savanna became a kind of perfect place in which the human body could flourish.

1:45Vibar Cregan-Reed is the author of Primate Change, How the World We Made is Remaking Us. And he says back on the savanna, humans had a few main postures. Standing, walking, running, and resting in a deep squat. But sitting, not so much. It meant that we could hunt for much longer, much more sustained periods of time. We could basically outrun any animal on the planet. So the human body was fantastic on the savannah. We have approximately 49 % of the bone density than that of hunter-gatherers. Wow! Wow. No amount of time at the gym is going to bring that back, right? Jumping forward hundreds of thousands of years to the agricultural revolution and access to food became easier.

2:38We didn't need to run around as much to hunt. The biggest change that the human body undergoes is when we decide to settle. The fact that your fruit tree is now in your garden as opposed to two miles away saves you a great deal of time. It also saves you calories. It means you don't need to find as much food if you're using less food. And then in the industrial era, the inventions of electricity and gas meant life became even more efficient and sedentary. The amount of time we spend indoors starts to have all kinds of effects on the human body. And from that moment, what we can see is a pull towards efficiency, so that you're removing friction from your everyday life.

3:25In the 1840s, it was definitely less than 1 % of the working population was doing sedentary work. Fast forward to the 1980s and the digital age. In the beginning, the people who worked with computers were considered magicians. That's when the personal computer entered the scene. But digital took the mystery out of computers. Computing comes into the home pretty slowly, beginning in the late 70s, picks up a bit in the 1980s. This is computer historian Lane Nooney. Until the point that computers were so embedded in our workplaces, in our schools, and in our domestic lives that we couldn't get out of it.

4:01Looking for a powerful home computer? Introducing the new personal system 2. Apple computer will introduce Macintosh. Lane studies the effects of the personal computer on our bodies. And they say that the digital age brought a world of pain to us. I think a lot of us don't realize how much pain we live in because of our interactions with computing. We don't remember a time before this kind of stress on the body. Aching backs, stiff necks, tired eyes. We're sapped of our energy. So the majority of our day is spent consuming technology. And what are we typically doing when we're consuming technology?

4:42Most likely not moving. Keith Diaz is an associate professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center. And he says this can cause big problems in the long term. Sitting for long periods at a time increases your risk for many chronic diseases, including diabetes, many forms of cancer, heart disease, dementia, and ultimately decreases your longevity. Oof. Yeah. So in Keith's lab at Columbia, they tested various ways to counteract all that time on our bums. And they found a relatively simple solution. So our research suggests that taking a walking break every half hour for five minutes can offset many of the harms from sitting all day.

5:35Keith and his colleagues found that leisurely walking for five minutes every half hour was the best way to reduce people's blood pressure, their glucose levels, and their stress. So working out in the morning is great, but not if you're going to sit for the rest of the day. What I like to tell folks is that it's not enough to just check off that exercise box for your day and think that you're done and you don't have to move the rest of the day. And a standing desk, that doesn't count because it all comes down to regularly moving our muscles. So our muscles are really important for regulating our blood sugar levels.

6:11they're really important for regulating our triglyceride levels which is fat in your bloodstream and for the muscles to regulate those levels they have to be used they have to be contracted they have to be stimulated what happens is when the muscles are idle when you're not moving and you're sitting for hours at a time the muscles stop regulating and stop pulling blood sugar out of the bloodstream they stop pulling fat out of bloodstream and obviously that's harmful to have blood sugar levels rising to have these triglyceride levels rising in your body. So what we're finding is that your body needs, we'll call them activity snacks, that it just needs just regular stimulation activation use.

6:57For them to regulate your body's health, you have to give your muscles the stimulation they need to do their jobs. At this point, maybe you've started walking while you're listening, if you weren't already. And maybe you're also thinking, walking every half hour, that's a lot of interruptions. Well, that's what I wondered too. Could people actually follow Keith's advice outside of the lab? And here's where TED Radio Hour listeners came in. Over 20 ,000 of you signed up for an NPR study with Columbia to try moving for five minutes every half hour, every hour, or every two hours. Now, it did not work out for everyone.

7:39This is a hard ask. But a lot of people did make it happen. And they loved it for many different reasons. Hello! Today I got lots of friends on our five-minute walks. It's good to walk. It's good to be outside. I have taken some of the breaks on my desk, marching and dancing. I'm a stay-at-home mom. While my kids are still sleeping, I've started implementing five-minute bike rides. 15 minutes of soccer drills outside. Five or 10 minutes before a meeting starts, sweep the house. Or swap out the laundry or clean the bathroom. My energy went way up. I feel so much better, can focus better, and I'm happier.

8:23I felt as if I could go for longer, and I felt the strain, the mental exhaustion dissipate. Now I'm moving more, and life's great. Keith and his team are still parsing all the data that they collected from listeners, and they're trying to understand more about what helped people succeed or fail at taking regular movement breaks. Because only half of the people who signed up were able to incorporate moving every half hour into their daily routine. So yeah, a lot of people dropped out. But for those who managed to consistently move, the preliminary findings are striking. Everybody improved. Everybody saw improvements in their fatigue levels, in their positive emotions, and they saw decreases in their negative emotions.

9:16But what we found was something we call a dose-response relationship. And what that means is that the group that took the most breaks every half hour had the greatest response. In other words, the more breaks people took, the better they reported feeling. And those breaks didn't seem to hurt job performance. Folks had more energy, reporting on average 25 % less fatigue. Yeah, we go from this vicious cycle of like feeling fatigued and feeling more fatigued and just spiraling downwards to now we're flipping it. And we're changing the game here and we're getting people to move and they're feeling more energetic and they're moving more and they're building towards a more positive life.

9:59I mean, that's amazing. And now, months later, for some, these new habits have just become their new way of living and working. And I want to share one story in particular from a listener named Zach in Maryland, who managed to use this body electric project to help him bounce back after a really tough year. Hey, Manoush. This is Zach from Maryland. The last year has dealt me a major stroke at the ripe old age of 44. That was tough. But having you guys in my corner made all the difference. My doctors didn't really lay out a recovery plan for someone in their 40s trying to juggle a career and family life.

10:42With my job, video calls and Zoom are a big part of my day and contributed to the prolonged brain fog and just feeling like, blah. But then I had some heart surgery to fix the root cause of my stroke. To my surprise, I found body electric about the same time. After that, I started taking these five-minute breaks every hour, or sometimes I'll just take a walk outside if I need some sunshine. So guess what? The brain fog is finally lifted, and I'm feeling more optimistic that it's gone for good. My cognitive therapist, she's blown away by my progress. I feel like I've got my swagger back. Seriously, you guys have been a lifeline for me during this whole journey, and I'm so grateful for everything.

11:31Thanks a lot. Zach, thank you, and congrats. Yeah, our technology keeps a lot of us from doing what our bodies need. For many of us, though, sitting doesn't have to be the norm if we experiment a little bit with our daily routine. But let's also acknowledge that easily adding movement to our lives, well, it often depends on who's in charge of our time. Yeah, well, I mean, ultimately what you're getting at is it's a culture change. You know, we spend our time trying to convince the workforce and employers that you should allow your employees to take breaks to move. an employee who's in a better mood, who's feeling less fatigued and feeling more energized, is a more productive employee.

12:18My hope is that our findings kickstart a conversation among executives, healthcare professionals, and tech designers to find more ways for more people to take their long-term physical and mental health into consideration every day. If you're curious and think you might want to take the Body Electric Challenge, Go to npr.org slash body electric. You can get a one-page guide to get you started. You can also listen to the series by searching for Body Electric wherever you listen to podcasts. When we come back, how our built environment makes us want to walk. Or too often, doesn't. Urban planner, Jeff Speck.

13:02There are enough people who want to live car-free that if given the choice to live car-free, they would do so. Today on the show, a more walkable world. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.

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14:26Informatica accelerates your AI readiness and scale at a pace that allows you to pay for only what you use. without compromise. Get your data ready for AI at informatica.com slash AI. Informatica, where data and AI come to life. Hey, before we get back to the show, I want to let you know about our next bonus episode for TED Radio Hour Plus. It's a big question. How do you get kids to want to learn about science and the natural world? Because a lot of them are on their screens a lot these days. So we called up mechanical engineer Saad Bamla. He's not just an engineer and TED speaker. He's also a dad who is obsessed with understanding how the natural world works.

15:16And he's got so many great ideas for getting the kid in your life into it too. You can hear them all next Wednesday. If you're not a Plus supporter yet, please join your fellow listeners to get all kinds of bonus content, and all our episodes sponsor-free. Go to plus.npr.org slash TED, or give it a try right in the Apple Podcasts app. And thank you. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And today on the show, a more walkable world.

15:53In 2020, Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo won re-election, in part by putting one particular idea at the heart of her campaign.

16:08The idea? To transform Paris into a 15-minute city, meaning make it possible for Parisians to live, work, buy groceries, play in the park, all within a 15-minute walk or bike ride from their front door. Her plans included removing 60 ,000 parking spots, adding bike lanes, urban forests, and more local businesses. All to make the city more climate conscious and give its citizens a better quality of life. And Paris isn't alone. Imagine a Cleveland where everything you need is less than 15 minutes away. Regardless of where you live, you have access to a good grocery store, vibrant parks, and a job you can get to.

16:50Yes, Cleveland hopes to give it a try. Dublin is the latest to embrace it. But while the term is new, the concept itself is not. Yeah, it's the old meal and a new wrapper. This is urban planner Jeff Speck. He's been talking about 15-minute cities for over a decade, but he's been using a different name for it. The walkable city. Yeah, it's the same concept. is just another way of describing this idea that most of your daily needs are at arm's length. Jeff's 2012 book, Walkable City, How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time, became kind of an urban planning Bible. And he says that since then, many cities have followed the playbook to get their citizens out of the car and onto their feet or bike.

17:44Almost everywhere I work understands the value of becoming a place where the car is an instrument of freedom rather than a prosthetic device that you need to live your daily life. And now, all these years later, the data show that walkability improves so many things for city dwellers. Traffic safety, community identity, tourism, stormwater management, transit effectiveness, urban competitiveness. It reduces obesity, other chronic diseases, health care costs, crime, traffic congestion, maintenance costs, fossil fuel dependence, air pollution, ambient noise. And it increases lifespan, neighborhood vitality, worker creativity, social interaction, intergenerational connectedness, community inclusivity, employment rates, economic productivity, local investment, property value, efficiency of land, public engagement, responsibility, urban resiliency, beauty, and happiness.

18:31Yeah, clearly the list goes on and on. And to experience it, Jeff says go visit Portland, Oregon, and then go visit Salt Lake City, Utah. Those are two cities from the same era, just designed based on different approaches. Walking around Portland is so much more pleasant than walking around Salt Lake City. Part of the reason, Portland has shorter street blocks. You can fit nine Portland blocks inside a Salt Lake City block. Those blocks have more things to look at, places to run into people. What's amazing when you walk down a street in Portland is that you're presented with so many different choices.

19:08You're also presented with a ton of corners, right? And every corner is showing you at least four different shops. But imagine the choices that you have. One morning on your way to work, you may need to pass the dry cleaner. Another morning, you may be, you know, dropping your kid off at school. Traffic is not the focus. The typical street in Salt Lake to carry the traffic that serves all that real estate has five or six lanes in it, whereas the typical street in Portland has two lanes in it. Jeff Speck continues from the TED stage. Portland made a bunch of decisions in the 1970s that began to distinguish it from almost every other American city.

19:45While most other cities were growing an undifferentiated spare tire of sprawl, they instituted an urban growth boundary. While most cities were reaming out their roads, removing parallel parking and trees in order to flow more traffic, they instituted a skinny streets program. And while most cities were investing in more roads and more highways, they actually invested in bicycling and in walking. And they spent$60 million on bike facilities, which seems like a lot of money, but it was spent over about 30 years, so$2 million a year, not that much, and half the price of the one cloverleaf that they decided to rebuild in that city.

20:28These changes, and others like them, changed the way that Portlanders live, and their vehicle miles traveled per day, the amount that each person drives, actually peaked in 1996, has been dropping ever since, and they now drive 20 percent less than the rest of the country. So Portland has been this shining example of walkability for a while now, and so, but where Where have you been working more recently? What cities are now trying to become more walkable and to catch up? And how hard is it? Well, I would say the real challenge is the many really small communities that don't have the wherewithal, the budget, the leadership to change themselves.

21:08And that's something you find in both well-off and less well-off communities. But I work mostly in mid-sized cities. Interestingly, I work in a lot of red cities, Grand Rapids, Oklahoma City, where local business leaders understand that being a place where people want to be is the key to driving their economic growth forward. That's been a new development in how cities view their future, that they realize now that the workforce is mobile and that people will locate in places that are more desirable. So a lot of cities who might otherwise have been resistant to change are saying, geez, how can we become more walkable so that we become more desirable?

21:46Oh, interesting. So you're hearing from more places who are like, okay, yes, we're ready to pull the trigger on this. We need to get going with turning our city into a walkable one. Yeah. So what that means at a deeper level is to create an environment in which people will make the choice to walk or to bike or to use some other form of micromobility rather than driving. And to do that, according to my general theory of walkability, the walk has to be as good as the drive, which means it has to satisfy four basic criteria. It needs to be useful. It needs to be safe. It needs to be comfortable. And it needs to be interesting.

22:24And each one of those criteria then places upon us a series of mandates that surround urban design and city planning, my profession, to create that environment for the potential pedestrian or cyclist. Okay, so to be walkable, the city needs to do those four things. They need these attributes for every walk a person takes. Let's start with the first. The walk needs to be useful. What do you mean by that? So useful has to do with the proper mix of uses. So places to live, work, shop, recreate, all within walking distance. It typically means having more housing in your downtown, which would balance the uses in your downtown and have it be active around the clock.

23:06I think that it's important to go back to Jane Jacobs, who wrote the most important planning book of our era, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She said a great place has to have people in it around the clock. and you can't have a great restaurant or a great gym without a dinner crowd as well as a lunchtime crowd, that when a neighborhood, which is principally a business district, becomes a truly mixed-use district with the proper balance of jobs and housing, it then comes to life. And that's a strange benefit of COVID that we've seen in a number of our communities is that more people are living and working in the same place.

23:43Yeah. But a lot of suburban areas that were just bedroom communities are now places where people are also working. And the downtowns have actually gotten a real shot in the arm as a function of that. Okay, so we've made our city, we've made our walk useful. Now we need to make walking safe. How? So the typical American street is designed for speeds well over the posted limit. And it's designed to encourage antisocial and quite dangerous driving, right? I mean, I was once working in a project in Alabama where we wanted the speed limit to be 25. And the engineer, the local engineer, made us engineer the streets for 35 because that's how the rules work.

24:27And that's the exact opposite of what they do in the Netherlands, for example, where you make the streets as tight as they need to be to cause the drivers to go the speed that is safe for the community. The resistance that you find to accomplishing this typically lies in public works departments and engineering departments, which are led by engineers who haven't been back to school in the last 20 years and who still embrace the older concept of traffic safety, which in America grew out of highway safety. And an important thing to clarify is that what makes you safe on a highway is the exact opposite of what makes you safe in a downtown.

25:06So if you think about yourself when you're driving on a highway where your speed is a constant, anything you can do to reduce opportunities for conflict, to increase elbow room, is going to make that street safer. So wider lanes, one-way traffic, no parallel parking, no trees, that's the clear zone, big swooping curves, right? All those things make a highway safer. But it's precisely the opposite that makes a downtown safe. You want to have narrow lanes. You want to have parallel parking. You want to have two-way traffic. You want to have lots of intersections and lots of other things going on.

25:43Trees actually make streets safer. The studies show that very clearly. And so the biggest impediment often in cities to making them safe and comfortable to walk around is a traffic engineer who is trained on highway design and has brought it into city design. Okay. Our walk is useful. Our walk is safe. How do we make it, number three, comfortable for walking? So comfortable is the most designy aspect of the discussion because, and it's a little counterintuitive, we like to be in places that have spatial definition. All animals, humans among them, are seeking two things, according to evolutionary biologists.

26:26They're seeking prospect and refuge. You want to be able to see your predators before they attack you, and you want to feel that your flanks are covered from attack. And that's in our bones, and we can't help it. So if you can picture lower Manhattan or the cranky parts of our oldest cities, those have the smallest blocks of all. And if you think about most European cities, they have a medieval core, which is the most delightful place to spend time. But not only are the blocks small, but of course the street spaces are very tight. And that gets us into the comfortable walk and that delightful feeling of being embraced by buildings on both sides.

27:05So that idea of spatial definition and creating outdoor living rooms is central to making walkable places. And our favorite streets tend to be quite narrow. And then the buildings aren't that tall, but they're considerably taller than the streets are wide. And that brings us to the fourth and final principle of making a city walkable, which is that the walk needs to be interesting. Yeah, so the final category of interesting is basically not having blank walls, not having parking structures, having lots of eyes on the street in the form of doors and windows and signs of human activity. You know, we humans are among the social primates.

27:47Nothing interests us more than other humans. And that's what causes us to walk. So when you arrive at a city to work with them, do you find that you need to first sort of change their cultural outlook on how to provide the best thing for their citizens? Is there a mind shift that you have to get them to do before you actually start talking about the details? Well, I think what's different now, as opposed to 10 years ago, or even certainly 30 years ago when I started doing this work, is that there's now an openness within public works departments and engineering departments to this information.