Dr. Lara Dungan investigates the decline of active travel in modern society. She explores how urban design influences our transportation choices. The episode highlights initiatives promoting walking and cycling in Ireland.
Active Travel (2017)
Director: Duncan Stewart
Writers: Duncan Stewart, Anja Murray
Stars: Anja Murray, Duncan Stewart
Genre: Documentary
Country: Ireland
Language: English
Also Known As: Eco Eye: Sustainable Solutions
Eco-Eye: Active Travel
Release Date: January 10, 2017
Filming Location: Various locations across Ireland
Synopsis:
Dr. Lara Dungan examines the reasons behind society’s shift away from walking and cycling. She delves into the health and environmental consequences of sedentary lifestyles and car dependency. The episode showcases how urban planning and infrastructure impact our daily transportation choices. Dr. Dungan visits communities in Ireland that are implementing initiatives to encourage active travel. She speaks with experts and residents about the benefits of integrating walking and cycling into daily routines. The program highlights the importance of policy and community engagement in promoting sustainable mobility. Through real-life examples, the episode illustrates the positive outcomes of prioritizing active travel. “Active Travel” emphasizes the need for a cultural shift towards healthier and more sustainable transportation habits.
Reviews:
– written by “” on IMDb.com
Also Known As (AKA):
Eco Eye: Sustainable Solutions
Eco-Eye: Active Travel
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#EcoEye #Activetravel #CurlewCrisis #BiodiversityLoss #Conservation #IrishWildlife #AnjaMurray #NatureDocumentary #EnvironmentalAwareness #SustainableIreland
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by now. Most of us know that fast food, sugar, and fat are badly damaging our health. But most of us don’t realize that sedentary lifestyles or physical inactivity are a leading cause of many of our chronic diseases today. Our lifestyles have put Ireland on track to becoming one of Europe’s most unhealthy countries. And our health system is struggling to keep pace with how rapidly this crisis is progressing. But we humans are products of our environment. Research has found that our built environment is having a huge impact on our health and is heavily contributing to the obesity epidemic we’re facing today. As a doctor at the front line of healthcare in Ireland, I’m concerned about how our health system will cope if these trends continue. I want to find out how our environment is one of the leading causes of today’s most serious chronic health conditions, and I want to know what we can do about it. [Music] There is one treatment that’s easy to access, completely free, and can help tackle many of the chronic diseases we suffer from today. It’s called exercise. I’m not a big fan of the gym, but for many, this is modern exercise. To burn off the calories in one Mars bar, I would need to run on a treadmill like this for over 30 minutes. A donut is probably over 40 minutes. And most people don’t believe that running an entire marathon wouldn’t even burn off one large pizza. We should all be doing our best to never or rarely ever eat any of these types of foods. But if we do, we should probably all be doing a lot more of this. Exercise isn’t just about burning off excess calories. Regular exercise in itself can help to combat chronic diseases such as diabetes, depression, and heart disease. A lack of basic physical activity in our lives today is dramatically contributing to the burden on our healthare system. The gym is a great solution for some, but in our busy lives today, most of us don’t have the time, access, energy, or willpower to make the gym a regular part of our daily routine. Something has changed in the last few decades. In the past, we naturally had physical activity built into our daily lives. We walked and cycled to get around. Physical activity was such a natural part of life that we didn’t even notice we were doing it. But today, we live in what many scientists are calling an obesogenic environment. To get a better idea of what’s really going on and how our environment could be influencing our health, I’m off to meet Professor Donal O’Shea, he’s one of Ireland’s leading endocrinologists and the HSSE’s new clinical lead on obesity. Tell me then about this obesogenic environment. What does this phrase actually mean? Uh I mean the obesogenic environment is where you have the unhealthy choice being the easier choice at every turn. Uh so when you want something to eat, it’s easier to phone for a takeaway and have it delivered. You’re not even going out to collect it. When you want to get to work or school, it’s easier and safer to get dropped or get the bus. It’s not safe to cycle. It’s not even safe to walk a lot of the times. I mean, you just have to look at where we are here now. uh you have uh Okonnell Bridge uh you have eight lanes uh and there’s no cycle lane. Uh when you have an environment that’s delivering uh physical inactivity and the wrong type of food choice as the easy option, then you’ve got your obesoggenic environment. Don, is it just the obese population? I mean, if I’m not obese, am I off the hook? No. And that’s a problem. When obesity is mentioned, 80% of the population switch off and they think it’s not me. Uh but when it comes to overweight and physical inactivity, this applies to over 80% of the population, not just the people we think of on as on the Biggest Loser or Operation Transformation. Uh this applies to the vast majority of people in Ireland and and that’s why it’s such a big challenge. Is this a huge cost to Ireland? Obesity is fueling the trolley crisis. People realize there’s a link between obesity and diabetes. uh they haven’t fully uh accepted that there is a link between obesity and cancer uh obesity and dementia and uh they are the problems that are filling our hospital trolley. So you’re not going to sort the health service and its acute end uh unless you deal with the obesity problem. So don then what do we need to do? What do we actually need to do to tackle this? We’ve got to get our nutrition uh education and advice and practical skills right from a very early age. And then we’ve got to engineer physical activity uh back into our daily lives. We now know that even if you are obese, but you can get yourself physically active, you get rid of the vast majority of the health complications of obesity. And the kind of activity that will do that is the amount of walking you do, the amount of cycling you do, if you happen to get swimming regularly. They’re the winners in terms of uh physical activity for health and and uh that’s why you’ve got to change the environment so that those activities uh are just easy and become the default. Dono made me realize that while exercise is vital, it can come in many forms. Building activity into our daily routines is hugely important. So, we should all try to keep moving as much as possible. Even in work, I try to be as active as I can. For instance, always trying to take the stairs instead of the lift. I have an app on my phone which tells me my activity as I wander around the hospital all day. So, I’ve done 8.3 km today and 48 floors, which isn’t too bad for a 12-hour shift. I’m lucky that I can incorporate activity into my normal workday, but for most, this just isn’t practical. More and more of us are spending our days changed to our desks. So, what else could we be doing to build physical activity into our everyday lives? The daily grind of commuting seems like an obvious target. More than half of drivers use cars for journeys that are under 2 km. If we could replace short car journeys with walking or cycling, we could get a lot of our daily activity without using any of our increasingly limited free time when it seems like such an obviously healthy way to get around. Why are we so reluctant to get on our bikes? I’m on the keys in Dublin and it’s just intimidating. I have a bus pulling out right in front of me here. Not even really sure where I’m actually supposed to go. Don’t know what’s beyond it. Can’t see anything. And now I’m about to be in a tiny narrow bit in between two buses. Okay, made it just have made some changes. So there is little bits of segregated cycle lane, which is great. But when a car pulls right in front of me like that, not [Music] great. A few seconds later, a truck completely ignores my ride of way and forces me to turn off the keys or risk getting hit. It’s easy to see how most people feel very vulnerable and can be put off cycling in our roads. Cars, trucks, and buses fly along with little regard. And when there are bike lanes, they’re often ignored. [Music] Cyclists across the city are angry about the bike infrastructure and are taking action to demand change. [Music] Kieran, tell me a little bit about what you’re doing out here today. Okay. Well, uh, we’re from a group called IBike Dublin and we came together about 3 or 4 months ago and it was out of frustration really at the state of the cycling infrastructure in Dublin and in particularly the poor enforcement of the existing infrastructure that’s here. So what we do is once or twice a week we come out and we come to one of the mandatory cycle lanes like you see here and we line up alongside it to protect it to stop people parking on it. Karen, why is this so important to you? It’s important to me because I cycle to work every day. It’s it’s it’s my chosen method of getting to work and it’s it’s the the quickest way I can get into work and I’d like to do so safely. I I I don’t like that whenever every time I leave the house, my family are concerned about my safety. That shouldn’t happen. and you know that shouldn’t be the case when you’re leaving your house to go to work in the morning, but it is unfortunately for people who choose to cycle in this city. Um, so that’s that’s a big part of it. Also, I I have children. I would love them to cycle to school. I want them to to have that opportunity as well. Uh, and I I I frustrated that I can’t and they’re frustrated that I can’t let them do so. So, you know, that that’s why it’s important to me personally. How can we make it better? Well, making it safer is the simple simple way to do it. In the recent budget, there were there was an announcement of increasing in cycling uh funding, but it’s still we’re not sure the exact figures, but it seems to be at best just over 2% of the entire transport budget, which is minuscule really. The uh the UN recommends that 20% of transport funding should be for active travel, but we’re we’re just not seeing that step forward at the moment. We’re seeing people talking about it, which is great, but we haven’t seen the action yet. I have kids here at school, and they would love to be able to cycle, but I can’t let them cycle on the on the roads. It just wouldn’t be safe. Though cyclists on average live longer and much healthier lives, most people avoid bikes because they fear the roads are too dangerous. And as we’ve seen, they’re definitely is a problem with our infrastructure. Bike lanes often end suddenly. And because they’re rarely segregated, they’re frequently completely ignored. It’s obvious that the planning and design of our environment influences the way we get around which then has knock-on implications for our health. Dr. Lorraine Darcy lectures at the School of Civil and Structural Engineering at DIT. She’s recently completed an EPA funded research project that looks at how the planning and infrastructure of a city affects public health. I met Lorraine in a typical new suburban town on the outskirts of County Dublin to talk about the hidden influence urban planning plays in our everyday lives. Here we have a walking and cycling path which is a great space and we can see there’s lots of people out walking their dogs. Um plenty of space and it’s isolated from traffic so people feel safe from traffic. However, you’ll also notice there be quite a lot of graffiti. Um, so we’ve tin cans, etc. here. And what they are signs of is what we call antisocial behavior. And more often than not, we notice this places where we’re not being overlooked where people in houses aren’t looking out onto the road. So an individual walking down here or cycling down here might feel very vulnerable because they don’t feel like there’s somebody there if they need them. Chances are the transport engineer or traffic engineer that thought about putting in this route said, “This is brilliant. We can get people moving through this greenway.” But the actual feel of the area and how it functions may not have been discussed. So people who are living in the new suburbs are much more likely to drive to work, drive home from work and um go into their homes and then have to leave again and drive to somewhere to get their physical activity. Um whereas in our older villages it was much more inherent in what we do. How has design changed then over the last number of decades? Is it that we just didn’t know how to design? Well, well, our focus changed before the 1940s. We designed everything for the pedestrian because people didn’t have cars. And so we had our walking, cycling, public transport. And then more recently in from the 2000s from during the housing boom, we made the assumption that everybody had access to a car. So we designed what we call car architecture where everything we’ve built focuses centrally on the car. And how do we go back on that? How do we get people out of the car? So, we need to make nicer environment, much more comfortable environments for walking and cycling, much more connected so we can have faster trips. So, what we have here is a great example of where people have burst a hole or broken a hole in a fence or a space to show us where their desire line is, where they want to travel themselves. So, it’s a very informal um gap through the hedge where they can come through, walk through, and here we can see at the other side of the door they’ve done similar. They’ve taken away a bit of fence and there’s a step there so that um we can have a pathway. These two communities want to be linked but it hasn’t been designed for that. So they’ve done it for themselves. But then when we come down here to the end of it and we come to a roundabout, one of the most hostile environments for a pedestrian or a cyclist, really difficult to cross the road. So things were built peacemeal. They didn’t link in with each other. We don’t have the connectivity to move on into the next neighborhood. The cars are really flying off this roundabout. I mean, what I’m feeling is that if your child was cycling on ahead of you, you’d be running to catch up to stop them here. Absolutely. Or if they crossing that road, you need to feel like you’re with them and you’re shoving them along, trying to move them on faster. With an older person, they probably feel panicked, more likely to fall, therefore less likely to take that trip in the first place. So, the nice freedom that you found on the greenway is immediately erased by this traffic filled roundabout. Yes. It’s a stressor. Yeah. So this is an example of an environment which an engineer would probably say is quite walkable because it’s got a wide foot path. You there’s a like a a verge that separates people from the the main traffic. It’s um it’s quite a comfortable space. It’s got some street lighting etc. But it’s actually relatively hostile here. There an individual walking. It takes a long time to walk along this road. There’s not much variety. There’s not much visual interest. even though there are trees, it it’s an isolated type of a walk, but it does tick the boxes for what people think we need to have. And then in relation to like our bus stops. So again, this was a traffic planning issue in relation to have because of the speed of the road, you need to have um a space where the bus can pull in. But as a result, we’re so far from either junction, either end of the road that the people living in these houses actually have about a 20minut walk to get to this bus. So by the time you get here, you could be halfway into town in your car. So this is an another example of how we’ve engineered this physical activity out and choice. So if you live there Mhm. you probably still have to walk 20 minutes to get to here. So why would you bother? So why would you bother? [Music] It’s fascinating to learn how much the science of design and planning influences our health. But if this is a design issue, then there must be a way we can redesign our built environment to make active travel a part of our lives again. So, is there a town in Ireland where this is [Music] happening? As part of a pilot project, the town of Westport and County Mayo received funding from a government initiative called the Smarter Travel Program. Often greenways are built outside of towns and cities for tourism. But here in Westport, it’s different. They’re built for the everyday use of the local community. I want to find out if this made an improvement to the lifestyles of the locals. Hi, Eva. How are you? Hi, it’s so nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Thank you so much for coming out today. And tell me what the greenways are. Well, greenways are off-road cycle tracks um and walkways. So they’re off-road and they link up housing estates and schools and uh they’re really good because there’s no traffic on them. So it makes it safe route ways for the people of a town to travel. One of the schools is about 70% that would cycle and scoot to school. So they can literally leave their houses, go onto the greenways on their bicycles and cycle school without meeting any traffic or cars. And what about then the long-term health benefits of this active travel? Yeah, I suppose it’s trying to get in exercise into your daily routine, not have it something separate. That’s something else that you should do when you come home from work. Um, we’re all really tied for time. Our lives are very, very busy. So, if you can u fit in physical activity on your route to school, on your route to work, um, that means you’re freer in the evenings um to do other stuff as well. So, it’s all about uh being physical and mobile all day long, not just um for a half an hour in the evening. Eva, I feel like I kind of have to see this for myself. Is there anything we can see? Yeah, right here we can get going. Okay, perfect. Great. Thanks a lot. Experiencing the greenways around Westport really shows how good infrastructure can make a big difference to people’s lives. More and more children are using these new greenways to walk, cycle, and scoot to school in a safe and relaxing environment. Simon Wall was the architect behind the greenways. So Simon, we profess to have bike paths and bike tracks all over this country, but a lot of them are just plain and simple not used. How do you get people to use your infrastructure? By providing quality greenways. The vast majority of our greenways are segregated from roads and they’re going through nice green settings and interlinking housing estates and they’re very practical because they follow desire lines linking existing residential areas. So their usage is not only practical but also the fact the way they’re designed independently of traffic, their use is desirable as well. Secondly, the surface is tarmac. So it’s it’s available for multi-use. Be it on a rollerblade, a wheelchair, a skateboard, cycling, or walking. It has a multitude of of use capabilities. And of course, an important component is that the greenways are illuminated with LED lights into the evening. So that increases the usage, particularly in the winter months where people are less inclined to get out on the greenways and start exercising. Is this something that we can expand that we can bring to other towns and cities around Ireland? I think it’s a really good template nationally that can be rolled out around the country and our experience that we’ve we’ve had as pioneers in terms of greenways in in in Westport, I think that experience can be shared nationwide. And do you think it’s worth rolling this out? Do you think it’s worth making this a big scheme? Definitely. The benefit greenways have afforded to the town of Westport has has been tremendous in terms of circulation from place to place and not using the motor car, but also in terms of the quality of life and social and recreational use in terms of cycling and walking has benefited the town tremendously. Physically and has a knock-on effect of a mental well-being within the town. The benefit has been immense. While the Westport greenways have been a great success, sadly projects like these are a rarity. Public investment in this kind of userfriendly infrastructure is tiny. So it’s unlikely that we’ll see more projects of this quality in the near future. It’s unfortunate because if we invested more in projects like these now, the significant health benefits would save a huge amount of money in the longer term. If retrofitting our towns and cities will progress this slowly, how can we utilize our current built environment and encourage people to get out and active? You know what? Has everybody got their fobs? Yeah. And everybody got their maps? Let’s go. Beat the street is an initiative that tries to encourage people to do just that. Children and their parents receive maps and key fobs and are encouraged to seek out beat boxes placed in random locations around the local area. It’s essentially a treasure hunt and a way to make exercise more fun. Elena, is it hard to get the kids involved? It isn’t hard to get the kids involved cuz they seen it they see it as a massive treasure hunt. In terms of the parents, it’s slightly more difficult to get change their behaviors. Um, so this is why we kind of use the kids to pester through the parents we bit to come out and play a game with us and by that means to get them physically active as well. What do you get when you have your points? So we have lots of incentives. So we have lucky taps. So we have free passes to gyms, free swimming lessons or their total prize is 500 euro of fitness vouchers for lifesize sports this year. Yeah. In its first year, over 10,000 children across the country took part, and it’s hoped that numbers will greatly increase next year. This is one of many initiatives funded by a new organization called Healthy Ireland, set up recently by the Department of Health. I asked Dr. Kate Fari from Healthy Ireland, what it’s all about. So Kate, I feel like a lot of the focus in Ireland and around the world is trying to make sick people better when they’re in hospital. What’s changing dynamic-wise? Well, that’s what most people think about when they think about the work of the Department of Health with the health service. Um, but Healthy Ireland, which is our national initiative uh led by government, but really to involve everybody in Ireland about improving health and well-being. So it’s really about a shift in focus to prevention because a lot of the chronic disease and disease that people know about like diabetes or heart disease or even cancers, a lot of them are preventable through lifestyle changes essentially. So that’s things like watching what you eat, uh having a healthy weight, not smoking, uh being physically active. And we do know that there’s lots of factors that can make it easier or harder for people uh to make those changes and to be healthy. Why is prevention so important? Well, I suppose when you look at the level of chronic disease in the population and as our population ages, so people are living longer, which is great, but they’re not necessarily living healthier lives. So that’s a huge, I suppose, cost burden on the health service into the future and the economy. So there’s a cost element to it, but it’s also really in terms of the quality of life of people, of lives lost, of opportunity lost. And we know the evidence shows that a lot of chronic disease is actually preventable. So I think that puts a real big responsibility on us to just try and to implement the evidence that’s there, the policies that are there that show it is possible to prevent a lot of that disease for our children to grow up being uh I suppose more active, having better physical and mental health and well-being and then as I say being able to achieve their their potential um in in life. Only time will tell if new initiatives like these will be enough to turn the tide and help us to live longer and healthier lives. Obesity and chronic disease are threatening to our healthcare system. And while we need to take personal responsibility for our own health, it cannot be denied that our environment plays a huge role. [Music] We have to demand greater investment in our environment to make it safer and easier for us to be as active as possible if we want to have a healthier Ireland for generations to come. [Music]
1 Comment
Put a helmet! Love