Permitting public health: Are mixed land use zones improving walkability?

CDC's Healthy Places Program identifies zoning and land use as critical for healthy communities. Zoning that segregates work, home, commercial, public and civic daily use activities perpetuates automobile use as the primary transportation mode and discourages daily physical activities such as walking or biking. Public health is compromised by diminished physical activity, leading to poor health indicators--obesity, diabetes, cancer, etc. Municipalities have implemented Mixed Land Use Zones (MUZs) to shorten the distance between home and daily activities. Using a study of 180 Mixed Land Use Zones in 25 California cities with populations of 50,000 or above, this presentation addresses the questions: Is this strategy working? Does mixed use zoning make neighborhoods conducive to greater walkability? This study assesses the relationship between municipal mixed land use zoning (MUZ) comprehensiveness (as gleaned from land use ordinances) and measures of walkability. The primary hypothesis is, controlling for city population size and SES, the higher MUZ comprehensiveness (i.e. adherence to the American Planning Association's model MUZ), the higher its walkability. Apart from its eventual findings, the significance of this research rests on its innovative, original measures of both MUZ comprehensiveness and walkability. These legal and social science data permit large "n" studies across MUZs and across cities. To date, prior studies of walkability used measures such as community audits and public behavior surveys, which limit large-scale comparative research designs.