For the last few years the League of American Bicyclists has been doing this Bicycle Friendly Community/State/Business program where they assess and study communities and grade them on their bicycle friendliness. Gee, that is great and all, but you know what? It is a load of bunk. What the League does with advocacy is a good thing, but ‘Bike Friendly’ is a mess. Worse, bike friendly is important to a relatively small segment of the population, but fitness friendly? Now we are talking.

Fitness is Important

Cycling is one way of getting and staying fit. It is not the most prevalent, nor is it the best for everyone. Bike lanes are great, but they serve a small population, and let’s be honest. We have roads already, we really don’t need bike lanes if people drive and ride with courtesy. What we do need are places for other fitness activities, and let’s face it, fewer car trips. What I want to know isn’t if a community is bicycle friendly, I want to know if it is fitness friendly.

What is Fitness Friendly?

A lot of things go into this, but ask yourself this. When you think of fitness activities, is your community conducive to them, and what fitness activities are we talking about. In many communities, in order to excercise, people have to get in a car to go someplace safe to do so. That is not fitness friendly. Fitness Friendly means that you can walk out your door and get to your workout without getting into a car to do so. If your children cannot go outside and play within walking distance of your home, you are not in a fitness friendly community, and that is what we need to be talking about.

Walking

Seems like the most basic item on the list. We actually use the act of walking to determine what is reasonable. “Walking Distance”. In most communities, we have roads. Roads built for transportation, but as cars have become the primary mode of transportation, any use of the roadway that isn’t a care has become increasingly dangerous. The solution in most communities has been to add sidewalks. Lovely. Can you hop on a sidewalk and walk to were you want to do your workout. Perhaps your workout is the walk. Can you go for a walk safely?

Running

Running, jogging, speedwalking, or whatever has the same basic needs as walking. Do you have those facilities? What percentage of the roads in your community have the infrastructure to make this possible or reasonable. In your community, do you find runners in places that you deem unsafe due to a lack of infrastructure for them? Let us just ignore the runners that won’t run on the sidewalk because it is concrete and concrete is harder than asphalt (it is, but the difference is small enough that a decent pair of padded shoes will absorb the difference, and on that same note, if you are landing hard enough that it is an issue, you probably ought to see a coach about improving your run stride).

Cycling

Oh lord, what a can of worms this is. What kind of cycling? Road cycling? that’s what roads are for. Mountain Bikes? off-road trails, Multi-Use Paths, and other options are all open question marks, but looking at a community and declaring it bicycle friendly is a huge thing when cycling itself encompasses so many different types of usage. This is my biggest issue with the League, they are too focused on too narrow a segment of cycling.

Swimming

Do you have community accessible pools in walking distance? They don’t have to be owned and operated by the community, but need to be accessible. No they don’t have to be free to use either.

Hiking

Are there trails for hiking, is the terrain even appropriate for these?

Climbing

Are there rock faces, or artificial rock facilities in the area for use climbing?

Skateboarding

You don’t want them on your sidewalks and near your place of business, then give them some place to go. Skate parks aren’t that complex or expensive.

Rollerblading

Standard width sidewalks won’t satisfy this. You need full Multi-Use Pathways to support these in community, but that isn’t a bad thing. The wider widths work well to support other mixed mode usages, like jogging with strollers.

Yoga/Cardio

Does your community have facilities for organized, or even open air yoga and cardio classes?

Weight Lifting

Does your community have workout facilities that offer weight training equipment?

Bike Friendly != Fitness Friendly != Bike Friendly

This is the whole point, you can be one or the other and not be both. But let’s go a step further.

A couple of years ago, MapMyFitness had a page that ranked cities around the world on how many activities were logged, by quantity, against the population size of the cities. IT was an interesting ranking, because when you looked at it, there is a correlation between the Fitness Friendliness of a city and the number of activities logged, but there were also some outliers. I live in the Atlanta, GA area, so when I saw Atlanta on the list, I wondered about it. Atlanta didn’t have much fitness infrastructure, few bike lanes, few multi-use facilities, though it does have a few pretty good public park areas. Perhaps that is enough, but the real outlier for me was Cumming, GA in the small city category. Suburban Atlanta at it’s worst. Sprawling, virtually no walkable infrastructure, few public park facilities, and at the time, it was heavily focused on youth sports. In short, there were a lot of people working out, but they were driving to destinations to make it happen. So while Cumming, GA may be a fit city, it is not terribly fitness friendly.

Time for a Fitness Friendly Certficiation?

Maybe. I doubt I am the one with the knowledge to create such, but it sure would be nice to have for outsiders to find and have a resource as part of the perks a community offers.