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.

On November 16, representatives of WBRR met with Randolph House residents to hear their feedback on conditions for walking in the downtown. Although there are sidewalks, there are some deficiencies that make it difficult for these residents to get around and to take advantage of the services and amenities right outside their door. You can read a full summary of the meeting here. The Herald published an article about the meeting in the 12/7/23 edition of the paper.

Oregon Representative Earl Blumenauer is retiring from Congress. He has been a staunch bike/ped/transit advocate the whole time he has served. He talks about many key issues in this recent interview from All Things Considered.

As captured by The Herald, the group attended the June 15, 2023 Selectboard Meeting to introduce ourselves and present on a number of subjects.