2253 - No Small Potatoes: Making the Health and Economic Case for Walking and Bicycling in Rural Idaho

Abstract

Baked. Fried. Scalloped. Mashed. Boiled. The diversity of Idaho communities is almost as diverse as the ways to serve the state's most famous crop; potatoes. And the way Idaho addresses walking and bicycling is just as creative. As Idaho's rural areas remain challenged by a loss of manufacturing, logging, and mining, the small cities that dot the state have worked to re-tool their image and find creative, low-budget ways to improve walking and bicycling and promote a healthy community. This session will delve into those solutions as well as how the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare (IDHW) is working with the state's health districts on built-environment interventions to improve active transportation. It profiles successes and challenges discovered through a multi-year effort to assess walking and biking conditions in 25 different Idaho communities and train local officials on the suitable conditions for walkability, which culminated in a year-long effort to quantify the health and economic impacts of active modes. The session concludes with a facilitated discussion on what types of data and analysis tools are available and most relevant for small towns and rural areas, and how that differs greatly from urbanized areas. The IDHW effort began with a series of Activity Connection Plans (ACP) for 25 small towns. The premise of this exercise was to develop a conjoined set of recommendations for linking walking and bicycling networks to recreation sites (public and private). IDHW then unveiled a two-day, rigorous training academy on walkability that focused on engaging fit-and-fall proof classes, senior citizens, planning officials, schools, elected officials, and local businesses in ways to assess their own community through the lens of walkability. The results were improvements for “lighter, quicker, cheaper” improvements that improved public health by promoting walking and bicycling to destinations by simple solutions such as crosswalk upgrades, pedestrian signal timing, and ADA compliance. The IDHW project is now in a phase of quantifying the impacts of walking and bicycling for the state from a health and economic perspective. This includes evaluating 20 years of active transportation crash data, quantifying the costs of those crashes, and replicating for Idaho an evaluation of the 15 largest cities in the state that mirrors Smart Growth America's “Dangerous by Design” report. The project is also “hot spotting” the entire state to identify areas where crash data and population health statistics reveal population clusters most vulnerable when walking or bicycling.