Walkability
Most of Auckland is within walking distance of a school: there are over 500 schools in the 560 km2 of Auckland’s urban area. That’s usually regarded as a Good Thing, and Healthy. Auckland Transport’s “walking school bus” program takes advantage of it to get kids more active and to get cars off the roads. The coverage is pretty impressive: in this map by Stephen Davis, the circles show a 800m (half-mile, 2 km2 ) area around each school:
However, as a story at Stuff notes, if most everywhere in Auckland is close to a school, the schools are going to be close to other establishments. With a school on most square kilometres of urban land, there will be shops in the square kilometre around most schools selling fast food, or junk food.
That’s going to be even more true in denser, more walkable cities elsewhere, from Amsterdam to New AmsterdamYork. “Near schools” isn’t a thing in cities. To reduce the number of these shops near schools, you have to reduce them everywhere.
This isn’t to say that all restrictions on fast-food sales are unreasonable, but having lots of things in a relatively small area is hard to avoid in cities. It’s how cities work.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
People have to learn self-restraint *some* time; learning is *easiest* when we’re younger. I’d be a tad more concerned about inherently-dangerous things, like chemical processing, or shady characters. Maybe Aukland doesn’t suffer these things? Then again: to call a uniform cover “walkable” supposes that these things are representatively close to where people Live; and therefore, so are the fast-food shops, the chemical-based industry, the shady characters.
8 years ago