CHEO’s Dr. Mark Tremblay talks about child obesity during the Conference Board of Canada Summit on Health Care Sustainability.
OPSEU’s head office is located about a brisk 15 minute walk from the Leslie subway station in Toronto. The building is located in a business park in which thousands of workers arrive each morning. Given the proximity to the subway station, you’d expect long lines of pedestrians to be making their way past the North York General Hospital and into the business park each day. The thing is, they don’t. It’s rare to see anybody on the sidewalk at all.
Half an hour a day of brisk walking would add tremendous health benefits to the people in the business park. Dr. Mike Evans has a wonderful animated talk in which he speaks about half an hour of exercise reducing dementia and Alzheimer’s, the risk of hip fractures, diabetes, depression and anxiety. If it were a drug we’d be all asking our doctor for it.
If you’ve ever done that walk from the subway, chances are you wouldn’t want to repeat the experience. Leslie is very wide at that point and thousands of cars go roaring by in the morning. There is nothing in human scale to relate to. The noisy underpass below the 401 is particularly inhospitable. Worst still, there is no crosswalk to give pedestrians the right of way against traffic zipping along into an Eastbound on-ramp to the 401. The walk is full of anxiety. When you get to the business park, the sidewalk ends on one side of the street, meaning you have to cross the road and back again to get to OPSEU.
Suzanne Nienaber says we are designing physical activity out of our lives by designing our cities this way. The Partnership Director of New York’s Center for Active Design, told this week’s Conference Board of Canada Summit on Health Care Sustainability that if you make enticing public realms, people will actually use them.
Nienaber is actively working to design physical activity back into people’s lives through good urban planning.
In a vertical city like New York – not unlike Toronto – it makes sense to encourage people to use the stairs. Two minutes of stair climbing has tremendous health value. So why aren’t we making stairs attractive places and urging people to use them with encouraging signs Nienaber calls a “stair prompt?” If you visit many of our buildings – such as the Ontario Federation of Labour tower, the stairwell is not easy to find, and you might have a problem accessing the floor you are looking for from the stairwell.
Continue reading →
OPSEU Diablogue 