Abstract

Less than one-quarter of U.S. adults meet physical activity (PA) recommendations, with rural residents less likely to be active than urban residents. The built environment has been identified as a potential facilitator of PA and local comprehensive plans are a foundational tool for guiding the development of the built environment. The purpose of this study was therefore to understand the current landscape of comprehensive planning state statutes related to PA and rural communities. We used primary legal research methods to identify, compile, and evaluate all 50 state comprehensive planning statutes for items related to PA and conditional mandates based on population size of local jurisdictions. The presence of population-conditional planning mandates and the inclusion of PA-related items was analyzed by state-level rurality using Fisher’s exact tests. Our analyses demonstrated that (1) broader PA-related items were addressed in state statutes more often than more specific PA-related items; (2) when PA-related items were addressed, they were most likely to be mandated, subsumed elements; (3) several PA-related items were less likely to be addressed in the most rural states and/or conditionally mandated for jurisdictions meeting minimum population requirements; and (4) only two states addressed PA directly and explicitly in their comprehensive planning statutes.

Highlights

  • Benefits, but only 22.8% of adults in the United States (U.S.) meet the U.S Department of Health and Human Service’s (DHHS) Physical activity (PA) guidelines for achieving those health benefits [4]. This figure has improved over recent years, rural residents lag behind urban residents: 19.6% of rural residents and 25.3% of urban residents meet DHHS PA guidelines [5]

  • Georgia and Oregon, did not discuss any required or encouraged items in their comprehensive planning state statutes; these states are retained in the denominator of the data because they did have comprehensive planning statutes on the books

  • The process and content of comprehensive planning is guided by state statutes that vary across the 50 states in the U.S This study sought to evaluate state-level policies guiding the process of local comprehensive planning and the PA-related content of those plans, with particular attention paid to implications for rural jurisdictions

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Summary

Introduction

Benefits, but only 22.8% of adults in the United States (U.S.) meet the U.S Department of Health and Human Service’s (DHHS) PA guidelines for achieving those health benefits [4]. This figure has improved over recent years, rural residents lag behind urban residents: 19.6% of rural residents and 25.3% of urban residents meet DHHS PA guidelines [5]. Socioecological theory outlines the crucial role of the policy and built environment in creating active communities [11,12,13]. Researchers have identified many specific built environment features and characteristics associated with increased PA [17,18,19], including bicycling infrastructure [20], mixed-use land development [19,21], increased residential density [19], and access to parks and recreation [19]

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