Subscribe to the RSS feed.“We’ve built America not for human beings, but for cars”
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CHP | Posted on: October 19th, 2009
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Air and Water Quality •
Economic Issues •
Policies and Laws •
Public Health •
Rural Health •
Transportation •
Urban Issues
Here’s a shout out to Dick Jackson (Richard Joseph Jackson, MD. MPH, Chair of Environmental Health Sciences at the UCLA School of Public Health) who has produced a television program: “Public Space/Public Health: How the built environment impacts our health.” Contact your local PBS station if you’d like to see it locally!
The program offers a challenging look at how our built environment impacts our health, and what changes we must make to improve the quality of life for everyone.
For example, did you know:
- Typical American families earn in real dollars what they earned in the 1970s, but we spend much more now on motorized transportation.
- It now costs the average adult $7,000 per year to own, maintain, insure, and drive a car. Many drivers must choose between health insurance and driving to work.
- From 1982 to 2000, the average number of hours stuck in urban highway traffic delay increased from 16 to 62 hours per person, per year.
- Americans now work more hours than people in any other major industrial nation in the world.
And on top of everything else, he’s talking about these issues in one of the most automobile-centric, individual-focused, communities on earth - Los Angeles!
For more on the program, visit the project’s website.
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I think that when it comes to health, people tend to focus on medical health (such as disease) and ignore or forget how their built environment can have a big impact on their health. I am not talking about building several McDonalds in a neighborhood either (although that is a health issue itself!) but every single fact that is mentioned above results a chain of health consequences that doesn’t get any better. More money spent on cars than health insurance leads to lower access to care. Becoming sick or needing care becomes more of a burden because of limited access, causing more stress. Stress affects the immune system increasing the risk of more illness. Top it off with air pollution from all the cars and you got yourself in quite the conundrum.
I think the remedy to this all is an overhaul of society’s value of what is convenient and what is best for their health and their neighborhoods. Although I don’t have the exact answer, city planning is a good place to start. By planning future constructions around the idea of health people will have no choice but to adapt and maybe come to enjoy their new way of living.