Daily Score Blog

I've read all sorts of reports and articles about the relationship between mental health and neighborhood design.  Most of them focus on the idea that living in a sprawling, low-density area -- the sort of place where you can't walk anywhere, and you only see your neighbors as they drive into their garage -- can be isolating, anonymous and...well...depressing.

But for the most part, I've thought of this research more as suggestive than conclusive.  Mostly, researchers find links between some feature of neighborhood design and an indirect correlate of mental health -- say, the likelihood of having a confidante in your neighborhood (see here), or whether people in a 'hood have a "sense of community" (see here). But when you look at actual mental health (as here) the relationship with neighborhood design is harder to detect.

Which makes sense.  Sure, I found that growing up in a low-density neighborhood -- a place where I saw most of my neighbors only a few times a year, while they were mowing their lawns -- was pretty isolating.  But you can hear similar critques about the anonymity and stress of the big city, or the isolation of life on the farm, or  the oppressive conformity of the small town.  To some extent, all of these critiques ring true; but it can't be true that every kind of neighborhood is particularly bad for your psyche. So before I single out  "sprawl" as being uniquely hazardous to mental health, I'm going to want a lot more evidence than a handful of anecdotes.

Well, some evidence just landed in my inbox:

There are more bicycles in my family than people: five people, seven bikes, and no car. That’s not the usual Cascadian ratio. In the greater Seattle area, for example, the typical household has 2.4 people, 1.4 bikes, and 1.9 motor vehicles. More than 40 percent of Seattle-area households don’t have even one bicycle, much less one bike per person, according to survey research by the Puget Sound Regional Council (big pdf). Worse, even bike owners aren’t necessarily bike riders: four-fifths of the residents of Washington state don’t get on a bike at all in a typical year. There’s a lot of Bicycle Neglect going on.

But there are also signs of bicycle growth in Cascadia—signs that Car-head is receding here. If this trend accelerates, many good things could follow, as they have in the European cities that have replaced Bicycle Neglect with Bicycle Respect.

Just confirmed, the Puget Sound orca population has reached 87. The new calf is probably less than a week old -- and isn't it awfully cute? Read about it here and here.

(Photo is courtesy of the Center for Whale Research.)