Back

I am back from a week in northern Spain, mostly in the city of Santander with my lovely girlfriend. I took note of some infrastrucutre as well as cycling, as I could see it, while in the city and will be making some posts in regard to that.

in the meantime I will leave you with this note on the new health care bill from streetsblog

...but the meat of the upper chamber's health proposal is set to become law by week's end.

Once that occurs, a new pool of federal "Community Transformation" grants would be established, with local governments and nonprofit groups eligible for a share of the funding...the grants would go towards projects that support public health, including "activities to prevent chronic diseases" and "the infrastructure to support active living.

I am not here to debate the bill, but this part of it is certainly going to be good for many communities that are working hard to change the way things are in regards to transportation and the movement of people. I am sure they will have a complete update on what the new bill means specifically for transportation. It sounds pretty good though.

Streetsblog article link

What our Food tells us about ourselves

In many ways we are actually what we eat and this article over at the blog for planetizen highlights some specific areas using GIS data that tell us a lot about ourselves as a country.
For thoes who don't know what Planetizen is, it is a:

public-interest information exchange provided by Urban Insight for the urban planning, design, and development community.

It has listings of jobs as well as books graduate schools and really lots of other very interesting and useful links and ideas for people in the planning field, especially people my age in undergraduate programs.

The blog entry I am highlighting was a quick mention of a new resource from the USDA, the Farm to school network, CDC, and the University of Illinois, Chicago(which has a good planning grad program actually) (among others). I was looking through the online Atlas, which gives an online visual representation to the data that was compiled by the group for this resource. It involves obesity percents by country, farmers markets, distance to food markets, restaurant expenditures, junk food taxes, percentage of fast food restaurants; big box stores and a whole lot more.

This data will be extremely interesting in raw form and put into a GIS database and manipulated to see more trends then the basic ones provided on the viewer. I was very excited to see this and I cant wait to have the time to take a look at the data and do some work normalizing data to population or land area to find some truly significant trends, as the article from ediblegeography (highlighted by planetizen) talks about looking at just diabetes rates, you can clearly see the significant proportion of the population in the south and south eastern US suffer from this health issue. Compare that to the %weight of fruits and vegetables eaten and you see that in this category the south does not consume as much as the west, east and west coast, is this a significant trend? I personally think so but you can look at the data and decide for yourself.

From planetizen via ediblegeography

Sustrans UTravelActive case study draft

Ok so i mentioned this in one of the earlier posts, that I completed a case study for Sustrans Leeds before i left in June. this is the first draft of the proposed article that is going in for UTravelActive. from the website, "UTravelActive aims to increase the level of walking and cycling amongst staff and students at the University of Leeds and Leeds Metropolitan University, and in communities around the Universities." so with this in mind the following bit focusing on the commuting and money saving as well as a bit of health was completed. there will be a second case study put together by Sustran's Sian Bell, whom I interviewed with for these. The second study will be on the website and focus on cycle tourism.

So here is the first draft, there are some changes in it that I have made since it was sent to me, if people would like to comment and add thoughts that would be great. unfortunately due to the nature of its presentation it needs to be short but let me know any thoughts! I would also like to thank Lisa Brannan, who helped me get my velocampus bike as well as set up the case study work.

UTravelActive

When the opportunity to hire a bike inexpensively was offered through UTravelActive’s Velocampus Leeds, John Pelletier, a student at University of Leeds, took full advantage.

He had recently lost weight and wanted to keep it off. He hired a bike through the scheme and found that not only did he maintain his weight loss, he lost more weight as well. He was physically healthier, but he also felt that his mental health had improved, ‘I have more overall energy and a greater mental capacity’ said John.

Although he had cycled since secondary school, John says that he cycled far more miles in the last six months with his Velocampus bike then in the previous 6 years. Cycling every day to University, often beating the buses and cars on his journey in and saving £3.20 in bus fares each day.

If the Velocampus Leeds bike hire hadn’t been available, John would probably not have been able to ride everyday as he wouldn’t have been able to afford to buy a good quality bike. He says 'The Velocampus scheme has changed the way I travel and I feel great!'. He has now permanently changed his travel behaviour and has decided to study for a Masters in sustainable transport and in particular, cycle and walkability infrastructure and development.

Result: Access to bikes gives people a healthy, low cost travel alternative that they may not ordinarily afford and in turn the opportunity to increase their physical activity through their daily travel.

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UTravelActive
Sustrans
Velocampus