New Study: Neighborhood walkability helps mental health as well as physical health
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NWHF Staff
| Posted on: January 8th, 2011
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Environmental Health •
Policies & Laws •
Public Health •
Transportation
Entry in the 2010 CHP Photo Contest by Josie Ruff, age 12
Plenty of research is available to show us that neighborhood “walkability” has a connection to physical health, measured by air quality, and even residents’ body mass index.
But a new study shows that aggregated mental health also rises with more walkable communities.
Researchers at the University of New Hampshire connected neighborhood walkability, with its level of “social capital,” which is a measure of personal networks, connections, and community involvement.
Based on a case study approach, the study’s authors argue that social capital is another important component of quality of life that may be facilitated by living in a walkable community.
Residents living in neighborhoods of varying levels of walkability in three communities were surveyed about their levels of social capital and travel behaviors, and comparisons show that levels of social capital are higher in more walkable neighborhoods.
Want to know how walkable your neighborhood is?
…Then contact your elected officials to let them know how well – or adequately, or poorly – they’re doing.
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Walkability is a problem in many suburban and rural neighborhoods. I visited the website Walkscore.com and entered my address to see how my neighborhood scores and was a bit surprised by the results of the score. For my neighborhood I got a score of 58 out of 100 with the commentary of “Somewhat Walkable”. I was surprised because there are many parks and trails nearby and there are stores nearby as well as a bus line. This score has me thinking about my physical and mental health since it’s below the average for Portland which is a 77. I did an analysis of my neighborhoods walkability a few weeks back and I graded it by Southworth’s six walkability criteria which are Path Quality, Safety, Linkage, Path context, Connectivity, and Land-use patterns. I evaluated each individually by taking a walk around my neighborhood and took an average of each score out of 100 and came up with a much higher score of 78. It just goes to show that you may think you live in a walkable neighborhood but when you haven’t lived in a place that’s much more walkable you can tend to overrate your neighborhood. I can see why my walkability score is low it’s not having the ability to walk it’s about convenience too. So if someone lives in an area with a very high walk score it’s likely in an urban area with many stores and services nearby. So the idea that people who live in a place with a higher walk score are more physically and mentally healthy makes sense since areas with higher walk scores are where more people chose to walk and hence will walk more and be more active. This is obviously related to increased physical health but when it comes to mental health it’s indirectly connected to other factors. One possibility is that people are less stressed out when they have more time to take care of daily tasks quickly by walking. Another possibility could be that because someone is more physically healthy they feel better about themselves and are happier and mentally healthy.