Active Living By Design

I found the Active Living By Design website with this story about Boston's Big Dig at NPR.

They're acknowledging that the current trends of building communities and infrastructures with the automobile in mind has been detrimental to active lifestyles. Boston's being afforded the opportunity to correct that now by creating safe bike and walking paths where their congested roads once were. The alternative commuter will be safer than when they were mixed with all the cars, so maybe more people can walk to work.

I've been complaining about narrow roads (with less room for biking) and our current system of zoning for a while. It's put all the residences together and all the convenience stores, grocery stores, any other commercial ammenities just out of reach of a walker or casual biker, so we all hop in our cars to go the 2 miles to the nearest anything. If these things were more integrated into our communities, we wouldn't need the cars as much and it could actually be safer to walk to these places.

I'd love to live more actively, but I have a real problem exercising for the sake of exercising. I want an active lifestyle where all the activity is part of accomplishing my daily tasks, not something for which I put life on hold, so I can go to the gym.