Welcome to the Walk Liberty blog

Welcome!  A little background.  I am a family physician living in Liberty, Missouri.   And over the last twenty-five years in practice, I have seen myself and my patients become heavier (and sadder.) Being a good doc,  I have encouraged my patients to increase their exercise so they would become healthier.  But my encouragement made no impact on their lives. Why was that? They seem to know they needed to exercise more.  And they seemed interested in doing it.  But it didn't happen.

It reminds me of a job I had working with a large software company.  From time to time, those of us using the software would complain of something being wrong with the system.  It was too slow, or there was some error, etc.  Frequently, the response we would get from the engineers was not an admission that something was wrong.  It was "FAD."  The system was "Functioning As Designed."

And that was why my patients were not exercising.  Their neighborhoods and communities were functioning as designed.   Their neighborhoods prevented them from incorporating exercise into their daily routine.  Exercise was something you had to go and do, maybe at a park or gym.  With their busy lives, they could not carve out the time to drive to yet another place in order to exercise.  The design of their community was trumping my skill and encouragement every time.

So I came to believe that we must redesign our communities to encourage healthy exercise.  And the easiest way to do that is to incorporate simple exercise, such as walking or biking into our daily activities.

Which brings us to Liberty, Missouri, my home.  Where we have a Walk Score of  22.  On a scale of 0 to 100 walkability, we are a 22.  A car dependent city.  And because of that, we are about 8 lbs heavier on average than folks who live in walkable communities.  And our city is less attractive to those looking for a healthy lifestyle.  (I'm looking at you Millennials.)  That drives down property values.  And most importantly, it makes us less healthy and less happy than we could be.

So this is a beginning.  I'll talk about walkable communities, complete streets, happy communities and urban design.  Hopefully there will be some dialog.  And beyond this blog, some action.  We can change our community for the better.  We can become a Walkable City.