June, 2012

The Sydney Morning Herald reported this week that a “far smaller” proportion of Australians is cycling today than was the case in the mid 1980s. The number of cyclists dropped on a per capita basis “by 37.5% between 1986 and 2011.” That must be unwelcome news for cycling advocates but music to the ears of [...]

We’re used to seeing lots of claims that suburban sprawl is a key cause of the obesity epidemic afflicting the nation’s children and youth. Here’s a new study that contradicts the received wisdom. While it would be premature to regard it as definitive, it suggests the relationship between sprawl and physical activity might be more [...]

The editorial in The Age yesterday, Mr Premier times are tough but you can leave your mark in the west, is one of the strangest opinion pieces I’ve seen in a long time. It’s so odd I wonder if its collateral damage from the current restructure at Fairfax. It ostensibly mirrors an accompanying feature, Faith [...]

Victoria’s Planning Minister, Matthew Guy, has taken a pasting over his decision earlier this month to expand Melbourne’s Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) by 5,858 hectares, as recommended by the Logical Inclusions Advisory Committee he set up. The media point out this is the fourth time the UGB’s been expanded since it was promulgated in 2002. [...]

There’s a regrettable tendency for some cycling advocates to demonise their fellows who wear lycra and ride road bikes, especially expensive machines made from carbon fibre and equipped with exotic groupsets. It’s an unfortunate attitude because so-called “lycra louts” are the pioneers of riding on the road in Australian cities. As a group they’ve had [...]

Over at Walkable DFW, there’re two collections of photographs of new detached dwellings recently constructed in post-Katrina New Orleans. One group shows dwellings designed or inspired by new urbanists and the other dwellings designed by architecture enthusiast Brad Pitt’s Make It Right program. One’s architecturally innovative and one’s traditional and cutesy pie. One has the [...]

According to a report in The Australian last week, the Queensland Housing Minister, Dr Bruce Flegg, is proposing to forcibly move public housing tenants with empty bedrooms into smaller dwellings. Dr Flegg said a Government audit found there are 8,700 public housing units in the State with two or more unoccupied bedrooms. Under-occupancy is the biggest [...]

I’ve argued before (e.g. here and here) that designing physical environments to encourage or force higher activity levels is neither an effective nor an efficient way to tackle serious health issues like obesity and diabetes. Here’s a surprising ripple in this debate. The EarlyBirds project in the UK has been monitoring insulin resistance in a randomly selected [...]

The CEO of South Australia’s Department of Planning, Transport and Infrastructure, Mr Rod Hook, is reported to have said the only way the state will get any money from the Federal Government for new freeways is if it imposes a toll on users. Unlike Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, Adelaide doesn’t have any tolled roads (neither [...]

As the exhibit shows, there’s evidently much more to a country’s level of home ownership than the wealth of its citizens. Germany is one of the richest countries on the list, yet its home ownership rate is 42% compared to 98% in considerably poorer Bulgaria. I’ve taken this data from Wiki, but it’s similar to [...]