Urban sprawl may be bad for your health.

• Position: On First Reading - Brief Article

Once upon a time, perhaps during the days of Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best, you walked a lot. You walked to the neighborhood store, to school, to the bus stop if you had to go downtown. The neighborhood design of the time encouraged exercise.

Now fast forward to the new millennium, Do too much traffic and too few walkways and paths in your neighborhood keep you from walking or enjoying a bicycle ride?

If you're still living in Small Town America, probably not. But sprawling suburbs often increase the time people spend in the car while making walking and recreation difficult.

And this can lead, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), to low exercise rates, obesity and health problems.

Obesity, which has risen so quickly as to be given epidemic status by the surgeon general, has increased by nearly 60 percent in adults over the last 10 years. It increases the risk of many illnesses, such as diabetes and heart disease.

The CDC reports that one in five American adults is obese, the highest rate of any developed nation. Simply walking to the neighborhood store could be a real benefit in the fight against weight gain.

Although consumption of fast food and soft drinks is thought to play a role, the report says that calorie intake has not increased enough to explain this dramatic increase in people's weights, and implies that suburban living also plays a role.

People are walking less due to urban designs relying heavily on the automobile, among other things...