How rails, bikes, and feet beat cars

Train service in Europe, as many of you know already, is wonderful. By the standards of most American cities, trains run frequently and reliably here in Brisbane and in other Australian cities, but the wait for a train in the Netherlands and Belgium, from which we’ve just returned, must average less than half the normal wait time here.

As Kristi said to friends of ours this morning, “You don’t even have to know train schedules. You just show up at the train station and you can be pretty sure there’ll be a train going where you want to go in a few minutes.”

Such high levels of train service, along with the predominance of bicycle travel in both the countries we visited, make us green with envy or, more exactly, envious of the “green” values manifested by the policy decisions of the Dutch and Belgians.

Given the great bus and subway/tram availability, too, getting around in much of Europe is easier than it is where we’ve spent most of our lives and, it turns out, better for health.

Population density, of course, is necessary for the economic viability of mass transit, but culture-wide expectations matter, too. There are plenty of places in car-dependent America with enough people to make train or trolley service feasible if people understood how much better off they’d be getting to work or school without jumping into their own cars.

Australia is no less car-dependent and Brisbane is spending millions today building roads, tunnels, and parking instead of expanding and improving bus and train service. Here, as in the US, owning a car is seen as a necessity of life.

It ain’t necessarily so. Tickets for European trains and busses are not cheap except when you compare them to the costs of car ownership.

Relatively speaking, adequate bicycles cost almost nothing. And if your city planners and government leaders have provided you with places where it is fairly safe to ride them, they convey some spectacular extra benefits, as does walking to and from bus or train stations.

In the New York Times last week, Jane Brody wrote about something that comes close to being a magic bullet for disease prevention and control and it’s called exercise.

My partner, Kristi, is a public health researcher who has found, in studies of older women and arthritis symptoms, how beneficial moderate exercise can be, and Brody cites the role of exercise in lowering the risks of “heart attack, stroke, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, depression, dementia, osteoporosis, gallstones, diverticulitis, falls, erectile dysfunction, peripheral vascular disease and 12 kinds of cancer.”

Further, Brody cites evidence that exercise can help you if you already have one of these diseases or “an ailment like rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, congestive heart failure or osteoarthritis.”

You name it, Brody suggests, and exercise probably helps it. Nothing in the work Kristi is involved in contradicts that.

Driving our cars does not provide exercise. Walking to a train or bus station does. Riding a bike does. If lots of Europeans look slenderer and more healthy than most of the rest of us, public policies concerning roads, rails, and bike lanes may be the difference.

Until messages such as this sink in and change our cultures, Kristi would probably have some interim suggestions. Exercise moderately at least five days a week. Walk or bike whenever you can instead of driving. Use stairs. Park far from the door of your office building or the store you’re going to. Join a gym and use it, if you can.

Long term, two key concerns — personal health and saving our planet — may depend on changes in public and private approaches to life. The Dutch and Belgians are showing the rest of us the way by walking, biking, and using cars less.