By walking twenty minutes each way from the metro in Atlanta to her job at the American Cancer Society, Lois Fletcher has lost more than thirty pounds. It’s a remarkable story about how tweaking your day to day routine can have profound influences on your health. But as researchers who study public health will tell, its really not all that surprising. Below are the conclusions of several studies that clearly illustrate the link between good transit and public health:

• Train commuters walk significantly more steps per day (+30%) than automobile commuters. Train commuters are also 4 times more likely than car commuters to meet the recommended standard of 10,000 steps per day.” [Environment and Behavior]
• A study conducted in Shanghai found that women who reported regular exercise and cycling for transportation were at a 20–50% lower risk for early mortality than less active women. [American Journal of Epidemiology]
• 78% of riders from three walkable New Jersey train stations met the national standard for physical activity. As a whole, only 45% of Americans meet this recommended standard. Read the rest of this entry »

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Inside one of Lille’s gorgeous metro stations. Photo by Martin Araya.

In April 2006, my husband and I were both teaching two-week courses at a university center in Lille, a city in northern France. I was excited, knowing that Lille was a hub for the Eurostar train: the place where trains coming to and from London branch off and go either south to Paris or north to Brussels. We reserved a one-bedroom serviced apartment just an eight-minute walk from the Eurostar’s beautiful, modernistic station, Lille Eurogare. I must say it was a great location, and very easy to get to from London, even as we lugged two large suitcases.

The “Sciences-Po” school where we were teaching was in a rehabbed portion of the city’s industrial zone a couple of miles from the apartment. The administrators told us we could get there by Metro, airily assuring us the trains were “very frequent.” They were quite right! It turns out Lille was the first city anywhere in the world to construct a driverless Metro system, which has now been operating with a good safety record there since 1983. I was amazed at the frequency with which these little two-car vehicles zip around the two-line system. On average, each one spends around a minute and a half on each section of track and half a minute loading in each station. Overall, you never need to worry about waiting; there are departures in each direction every two minutes! Read the rest of this entry »

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Photo by keso of Flickr.

I was on the Wired Blog today and came across an article about Beijing’s ambitious plan to create one of the world’s largest metros, nearly twice as big as the one in Moscow and just edging out London’s vast underground network. A few weeks back I posted an entertaining video about a hard-hat wearing journalist who tests out the new metro, as well as Beijing’s new Bus Rapid Transit system. But I must admit that the Wired piece is a little bit more helpful when it come to the facts and figures. Here’s some of the interesting things it has to say:

• Beijing has a population of 17.4 million people
• By 2020 it will have expanded to 21.4 million people
• The Beijing government plans to invest 80 billion yuan ($10.8 billion U.S.) on its metro network, currently 142-kilometer long
• 5 new subway lines are under construction and will be finished by 2015
• At the end of the project Beijing expects to have 561 kilometers of metro track

Even with all this construction, it’s still probably not enough.

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