Research

This post was authored by Tiffany Lam

The majority of Americans live in urban or suburban areas, though around 15 percent of Americans live in nonmetropolitan regions, which make up 72 percent of US land. Although the proportion of Americans who are rural residents has recently declined, these communities still comprise 46.1 million Americans (USDA, 2015). When it comes to health outcomes, researchers have identified inequities in rural areas, including higher rates of obesity compared with urban residents and differing levels of physical activity by geographic region (Yousefian et al., 2009; Hansen and Harley, 2015).

Look both ways. Wear your helmet. We’ve all heard these maxims about safety, and probably shared them a time or two.

Aside from distance to school, safety is a leading factor for both adults and children in the decision to participate in physical activity and walk or bike to school (Nasar, 2015; Zhou et al., 2009). However, adopting those individual protective behaviors will not provide an easy solution. This blog post will unpack three reasons why the concept of safety, particularly in the context of safe travel to school, can be challenging to conceptualize and achieve.

This blog post was written by our research advisor, Christina Galardi.

As Safe Routes to School practitioners, schools, parents, and community partners work together to make it easier and safer for kids to walk to school, it is important to understand barriers to participation and how we can effectively address them. In this research beat, we’ve gathered the academic literature on Walking School Buses to share evidence and key takeaways.

To increase physical activity opportunities available through schools over the long term, we need to put it in writing – through policy.

This guest blog post was written by our research adviser, Christina Galardi.

First, let’s start with a pop quiz to get your brain working - I’ll give the answers at the end.

This guest blog post was written by our research adviser, Christina Galardi.

Back to the basics: even though I’ve completed college-level mathematics courses, this month I returned to elementary school for an important lesson in my 1,2,3’s.

Can rural roads be good places to walk and bicycle?  Why yes, they certainly can!  My daughters got their first bicycles when they were five or six.  They loved the bikes – but they couldn’t ride them.  Because the streets in our small city were a little too busy for crazily uncoordinated families with bicycles and small children, we would drag ourselves, the girls, and the bikes over to the park every couple weeks.  We would run around awkwardly holding the bicycle seats and trying to prevent the girls from crashing to the ground.  While this did succeed in providing the whole family with