Centers for Disease Control & Prevention advocate for complete streets
July 29th, 2009By Sara Wolfson
The public health community, increasingly alarmed over Americans’ increasing waistlines, has sided wholeheartedly with the need to make our streets safe for walking and biking.
But it was still big news this week when CDC researchers pushed forward community recommendations for preventing obesity in the highly-influential and trusted Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). Out of 24 recommendations, 6 relate to complete streets. One directly references the National Complete Streets Coalition.
The National Complete Streets Coalition’s Barbara McCann writes:
The new strategies were introduced at CDC’s Weight of the Nation conference, with a strong focus on environmental change that was previewed in a prominent USA Today story that discussed complete streets. I spoke at the conference about the tremendous growth in complete streets policy adoption across the country, often spearheaded by groups with a mission to improve physical activity, such as Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota’s commitment to active living, YMCA’s Achieve Communities, and Kellogg’s Food and Fitness initiative. The complete streets message was also carried throughout the meeting by many others. Walking guru Mark Fenton highlighted complete streets policy initiatives. Most notably, Senator Tom Harkin spoke about the Complete Streets Act of 2009 and his determination to make it law.
She includes many more examples of the public health community openly embracing complete streets as a matter of community health.
Health advocates from different stripes across the country are banding together and clearly stating that making streets safer and more welcoming for walking or biking — like just making it possible for kids to walk to school once again — will make and keep Americans healthier, reduce health care costs, and make progress on the obesity epidemic.
