The built environment, walking, and physical activity: Is the environment more important to some people than others?

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Abstract

We examine whether specific types of people are more sensitive to the built environment when making a decision to walk or engage in other physical activity. Over 700 participants from 36 environmentally diverse, but equivalent-sized neighborhoods or focus areas responded to a survey, kept a travel diary, and wore an accelerometer for seven days. Subgroups defined by demographic and socioeconomic variables, as well as self reported health and weight status demonstrate that most subgroups of people walk more for transportation in high density areas. However, only the less healthy walked more overall in high density areas after controlling for sociodemographic characteristics and physical activity was remarkably similar among the groups and across different kinds of environments. While environmental interventions may not increase physical activity population wide, some populations – including some for whom interventions may be important such as the less healthy and the unemployed or retired – are more affected by these neighborhood environmental characteristics.

Section snippets

Background

How do density and street pattern affect travel walking, leisure walking, total walking and physical activity for different types of people? Work in the field of transportation has found people living in certain types of places walk more for travel (Pucher and Renne, 2003, Transportation Research Board, 2005). In addition, there has been a great deal of recent interest in the potential to leverage this situation to try to increase overall physical activity, an important public health aim (Handy

Methods

The TCWS involved 716 participants sampled from the 36 environmentally diverse, but equivalent-sized neighborhoods or focus areas, with approximately equal numbers in each area. Focus areas were 805  805 m and were selected from part of the Twin Cities metropolitan area for which particularly good GIS data were available. Within the target region, 130 such focus areas were identified and stratified into high (>24.7 persons/ha or 10/acre), medium, or low (<12.4 persons/ha or 5/acre) gross

Results

Table 1 reports the sample characteristics of subpopulations by race, education, sex, self reported health, presence of children in the household, employment vs. unemployment or retirement, car ownership, and obesity. All were self reported with the exception of obesity (body mass index > 30) – height and weight were measured in person and the index calculated from those figures. Self reported health was assessed through an answer to: in general, would you say your health is: Excellent, Very

Conclusions

While the built environment alone is not an answer to the problem of obesity and related health concerns, the hypothesis that it plays an important role in prevention remains appealing to scholars and policymakers. Overall, as predicted by transportation research most subgroups of people in this study walked more for travel in high density areas. In the adjusted model, there were no significant relationships for leisure walking and the environmental features analyzed. Further, the relationship

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the Active Living Research program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that funded this study. We thank Joel Koepp for valuable assistance.

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