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On a crisp October day, about 200 Lawrence area residents gathered at the Building a Healthier Lawrence event to hear a national expert offer ideas on how their town can encourage more physical activity and become more accessible to pedestrians and bicyclists.
Mark Fenton, the host of the PBS series “America’s Walking,” is an engineer and champion walker who travels the country helping cities find ways to make it easier for people to walk, bike and use mass transit.
The Kansas Health Foundation brought Fenton and Green Living expert Sara Snow to Lawrence so they could meet with the Foundation’s board and headline this community event at the Lawrence Arts Center. The Foundation’s partners for this event were the Douglas County Community Foundation and Live Well Lawrence, a coalition that encourages healthy changes in the community.
Before his presentation, Fenton took about 20 county government and planning committee officials on a short walking tour near an elementary school to help illustrate the need for better sidewalks, bike lanes, bike racks and trails that connect neighborhoods to key areas of town.
On stage at the Lawrence Arts Center, Fenton tells the crowd that anytime the city touches a road, it should be improved for all users including bicyclists, pedestrians and bus riders by creating buffers between sidewalks and roads, adding crosswalks and turning four-lane streets into two-lane streets with a center turn lane and bike lanes. “Right now, we do bicycle lanes as an afterthought on roads with cars going 40 miles an hour,” he says.
Cities like Lawrence should consider building apartments above garages and businesses to slow down urban sprawl, Fenton says. And if downtown Lawrence follows the lead of Des Moines, which implemented back-in-only parking because it prevents many collisions and is safer for pedestrians and bicyclists, it would only lose one parking spot per block.
He also encourages rotating the location of farmer’s markets so they can be taken to low-income areas. “The same people who can’t get out of their neighborhoods because they don’t have cars are the ones who are more likely to eat fast food that’s close by,” Fenton says. Another idea is to ask businesses, service organizations, churches and neighborhoods to adopt a sidewalk near them and improve it.
He praises Lawrence for some of the moves it has already made toward healthy community design, such as roundabouts. “The tool kit is large, and you’re already using a lot of it here,” Fenton says. “Just keep using it more.”
If our communities don’t change to encourage more physical activity, many lives will be cut short, Fenton says. Today, there are 365,000 premature deaths each year because of inactivity and poor eating habits. Only tobacco kills more Americans prematurely.
“The real reason I care about this is that I care about all of the kids,” Fenton says. “They’re part of the first generation in our society to have statistically shorter life expectancies than their parents. And it’s not Ebola or H1N1 or HIV/AIDS. It’s the diseases of sedentary lifestyles. We’re building a world that discourages them from being physically active.”
As people walked into this event, Live Well Lawrence volunteers handed them forms that they could fill out to join that coalition’s efforts to build a healthier Lawrence. After the audience filed out of the theater, Douglas County Community Foundation Executive Director Chip Blaser was thrilled to find that about 50 attendees left their contact information and wanted to help.
With that level of positive reaction from the community, it looks like Lawrence’s efforts to get healthier are already gaining speed.
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