Many people in the U.S. do not walk, bike or engage in other forms of active transportation, missing an important opportunity to improve their cardiovascular health, concludes a new study.
made the rounds on twitter today and I have to say, christ alive
This is a bad headline. Here’s a couple important bits from the article:
the majority of previous studies done on physical activity primarily focused on its use in recreational activity or leisure time activity, he noted.
less than one quarter of U.S. adults in a nationally representative sample reported walking or bicycling for transportation for more than 10 minutes continuously in a typical week.
So this study is intentionally focused on walking and biking “for transportation”, and excludes people who do either activity for recreation or exercise or any other reason. I myself would have probably reported that I do zero walking or biking for transportation to this survey - but I get between 90 and 120 minutes of total walking almost every day walking my (very energetic) dog.
Also no mention of bikes in the title seems odd. I certainly don’t walk for transportation because things are too far, so I assumed I was part of the 75% it was talking about, even though I go through periods of using active transport as my primary method of commuting. Wish clickbait was not so prevalent.
But I think shows where the problem is - to walk in US you need to have make conscious effort and usually drive yourself first to some park.
Meanwhile dumbass American smart watch thinks that I am training every time I walk from work to my favorite eatery for lunch.
I just took the title from the webpage. The situation is not as dire as that suggests, albeit, not once walking 500m a week for transportation needs once a week is still pretty fucking dire.
I do think it’s bad, but it outlines a problem with walking infrastructure. In many places, you really can’t get anywhere by walking. For example, a friend and I had to take a quick trip up the road and on the way realized that we should add a stop to our trip to get two things done at once. Place A and Place B are very close to one another, but we could not walk from one to another because there was no walking path, and there were bushes and ditches blocking the only way. We weren’t going to go around those and into 50-60 mph traffic on foot. So we drove. Left the one parking lot by car and went into the second parking lot. The entire trip we may be got 50 total steps.
This is a bad headline. Here’s a couple important bits from the article:
So this study is intentionally focused on walking and biking “for transportation”, and excludes people who do either activity for recreation or exercise or any other reason. I myself would have probably reported that I do zero walking or biking for transportation to this survey - but I get between 90 and 120 minutes of total walking almost every day walking my (very energetic) dog.
Also no mention of bikes in the title seems odd. I certainly don’t walk for transportation because things are too far, so I assumed I was part of the 75% it was talking about, even though I go through periods of using active transport as my primary method of commuting. Wish clickbait was not so prevalent.
But I think shows where the problem is - to walk in US you need to have make conscious effort and usually drive yourself first to some park. Meanwhile dumbass American smart watch thinks that I am training every time I walk from work to my favorite eatery for lunch.
I just took the title from the webpage. The situation is not as dire as that suggests, albeit, not once walking 500m a week for transportation needs once a week is still pretty fucking dire.
I do think it’s bad, but it outlines a problem with walking infrastructure. In many places, you really can’t get anywhere by walking. For example, a friend and I had to take a quick trip up the road and on the way realized that we should add a stop to our trip to get two things done at once. Place A and Place B are very close to one another, but we could not walk from one to another because there was no walking path, and there were bushes and ditches blocking the only way. We weren’t going to go around those and into 50-60 mph traffic on foot. So we drove. Left the one parking lot by car and went into the second parking lot. The entire trip we may be got 50 total steps.