Walk+Bike+Roll Randolph

Amidst the pre-Christmas hustle and bustle, I was listening to NPR and just happened to tune in to the end of a TED Radio Hour episode discussing so-called “Blue Zones”. If you haven’t heard of them, blue zones are those places around the world where people live especially long and healthy lives, regularly reaching into their 90s and even hitting the century mark. Incorporating regular physical activity into their lives is one of the contributing factors. Here is a quote from the show that caught my attention, “And then once they identified some politically expedient policies, we got them to implement several of them. The big one in Albert Lea (Minnesota) is they were about to widen their main street and draw more traffic from the interstate, and we convinced them to actually, instead of widening the street, widening the sidewalks and taking that street-widening money and putting a walking path around the adjacent lake, and also put in about three miles of sidewalks to connect every neighborhood to downtown. And lo and behold, once you invited pedestrians to walk downtown, downtown filled up. And it not only increased the number of – amount of physical activity people got by we calculate between 15 and 20%. Downtown became a vibrant place. People were sitting at the local cafes and visiting the local marketing.” I encourage you to check out the whole episode and to think about how we can work with the Town of Randolph to adopt policies to make it safer and more attractive to walk and bike around town.