First Lady Michelle Obama has kicked off a national campaign to fight childhood obesity which helps tie sprawl to unhealthy living.

In my home, we weren’t rich. The foods we ate weren’t fancy. But there was always a vegetable on the plate. And we managed to lead a pretty healthy life.

Many kids today aren’t so fortunate. Urban sprawl and fears about safety often mean the only walking they do is out their front door to a bus or a car. Cuts in recess and gym mean a lot less running around during the school day, and lunchtime may mean a school lunch heavy on calories and fat. For many kids, those afternoons spent riding bikes and playing ball until dusk have been replaced by afternoons inside with TV, the Internet, and video games.

Similarly, the U.S. Surgeon General released a report stating:

The car-dependent design of our communities has made it much harder for our children to walk to school and much harder for us to shop and do other errands entirely on foot or by bicycle.

Recommendations include:

• Build or enhance infrastructures to support more walking and bicycling.
• Support locating schools within easy walking distance of residential areas.

Now contrast that with Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson’s archaic position on sprawl:

Well, let me state it unequivocally: I love sprawl. I need it. I promote it. Oakland County can’t get enough of it. Are you getting the picture?

Then in his 2010 state of the county address, Patterson said he’d allocate $50K per year from the Brooksie Way run to healthy living mini-grants:

I want Oakland County to be the healthiest county in the United States and I want my residents to enjoy a healthy quality of life.

So, mayors, supervisors, community leaders, there is $50,000 available to you for programs which have as their sole purpose the improvement of the health of your residents.

Patterson clearly doesn’t understand the connection between sprawl, obesity and unhealthy living.

In the first such national study, health researchers found that people who live in counties marked by sprawl-style development tend to weigh more, are more likely to be obese and are more likely to suffer from high blood pressure

As for his $50,000 program, keep in mind that Oakland County gives $1 million a year to the Road Commission for Oakland County to build and expand roads.

Improving Oakland County’s quality of life is clearly in the backseat, if not the trunk.

And we are getting the picture.

The Center for Neighborhood Technology recently released a web tool that allows you to look at different geographic data relating to housing and transportation costs.

It’s called the H+T Affordability index. The thought is we shouldn’t look just at housing costs when evaluating house affordability. We need to consider transportation costs as well.

Often you’ll hear home buyers mention how much more house they can get further in the sprawling areas. What’s often not mentioned is living there has higher transportation costs because there’s more driving, less public transit, and reduced walkability and bikeability. Combining housing and transportation costs should give a more accurate estimation of affordability.

What’s interesting about the H+T web tool is it lets you select and view different datasets. One very interesting dataset is the average street block size. The smaller the blocksize, the most walkable the area likely is.

And more bikeable.

Below is a screenshot showing average block sizes for Metro Detroit. Based on my experience, this matches well with this area’s bikeability. Detroit and the inner ring suburbs are very good while the outer suburbs are not very good at all.

There are some dark spots in otherwise bikeable communities. These are often parks, golf courses, major industrial zones, or other superblocks.

Does this map estimate road bikability in your neighborhood?

Yo, here’s a fun, snappy Friday video via Streetsblog:

Traffic engineer Ian Lockwood from Glatting Jackson has been to Detroit a few times now for planning efforts to spur redevelopment and revitalization.

He’s highlighted a key concept for bicycle, pedestrian, and transit advocates. Current U.S. traffic engineering culture pursues greater mobility, i.e. how fast someone can get between places. That’s often why they are stuck thinking primarily about cars, wider roads, higher speeds, and interstate expressways.

Lockwood says we should all focus on accessibility instead. In doing so, we’d try to rein in sprawl, increase density, and improve transportation options.

Perhaps given our automotive heritage, Detroit seems particulary focused on mobility. A recent Brookings Institute report found Metro Detroit led the nation in job sprawl. Seventy-seven percent of our jobs are more than 10 miles from the city center.

From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

“From transportation to workforce development to regional innovation and the provision of social services, the spatial distribution of a metro area’s jobs can ultimately influence its economic productivity, environmental sustainability, and social inclusion and equity,” wrote Elizabeth Kneebone, a senior research analyst at Brookings and author of the 23-page report.

Is there any wonder why we can’t find enough money to repair our roads?

At a recent traffic engineering meeting, Jonathon Levine, a researcher from the University of Michigan gave a presentation about accessibility versus mobility. Fortunately it’s on-line but be forewarned: it’s a little traffic geeky. Even so, the first couple minutes really nail the point about accessibility versus mobility.

And for those that can’t make it through the entire video, this slide really captures the main thrust that accessibility should be the ends. The means includes mobility, proximity (how close things are together) and connectivity (can you access them remotely, e.g. through the Internet).

This needs to be the transportation paradigm for Metro Detroit, and if it were, it’d make bicycling a viable transportation option for more people more often.

The Huron Valley Trail provides a connection between South Lyon to Wixom. People use the trail because it’s away from cars, it’s green and just a great place to get away.

Lyon Township is trying to change that.

They want to re-route the rail-trail just south of I-96 and east of Milford Road. Rather than run straight through some greenspace, they want to increase their sprawl and build a big ring road.

Under the latest plan, the trail would be routed along this busy ring road. They also want to allow active driveways across the trail, which means it would no longer meet AASHTO guidelines — something that is required by township ordinance.

The DNR is saying “no”. They own the trail property. It was purchased and developed with taxpayer dollars as a recreational facility. They are defending this public investment and rightly so.

Another defender is Fred Dore, long time supporter and rider of this trail. He’s leading the grassroots effort to protect the trail from “being besieged by commercial development interests that may forever damage its utility, safety and natural beauty.”

He’s urging trail users to contact the DNR and Lyon Township officials to prevent this damaging trail reroute.

Link: Fred Dore’s letter to the DNR Director

The sad part about this is Lyon Township officials are claiming this is preventing growth. Southeast Michigan is not growing. Lyon Township is only getting larger because some other community is shrinking.

This is just another example of how the lack of regional planning hurts Metro Detroit’s long term economic health.

It’s just sprawl. And it’s certainly no justification for damaging our public investment in trails.