I agree that possibly preventing a heart attack won’t motivate people to do regular exercise. Most smokers would give up smoking if that were the case.

Also it’s not clear if you are indeed going to prevent blocked arteries by exercising. What is clear is that the probability that you are going to survive an heart attack is much higher if you are fit. Also you’ll probably notice the symptoms of blocked arteries long before you get the heart attack.

There’s a lot more variation from person to person than is generally recognized.

Take me as an example: one of the key indicators of heart disease risk is blood pressure. Mine consistently runs in the neighborhood of 100/60 (which is considered very good). It did even during a time in my life when I was extremely sedentary and quite a bit overweight. Pregnancy, anxiety, weight, age, nothing seems to affect it. Several years ago, when I was getting my vitals checked before I had abdominal surgery, it was 95/60. The nurse said to me “I guess nothing fazes you!” but in fact I was quite anxious and had been under severe stress for the previous five months. I chalk it up to heredity: my dad is the same way.

Exercise is definitely beneficial, but I think the best way to motivate people to exercise is to point out to people that if you’re in better shape you can do more, feel better, get tired less easily, etc. These are tangible and almost immediate effects of regular exercise. The theoretical possibility of preventing a heart attack at some unspecified date in the future just isn’t very motivating for most people.

Why am I always getting off topic?

Yes I forgot that most countries are not so flat like Holland . Still, strenuous excercise is important even for older people. My father of 70 exercises every other day on his hometrainer. He get’s his heart rate up to around 130. He had suffered a heart attack about ten years ago and had a bypass operation. He changed his habits afterwards.

I know many young people who are not as fit as my father. They say: ”well I walk every day”. Perhaps that’s enough to prevent someone from becoming a miserable wreck, but it’s not good enough to properly maintain the cardiovascular system.

Cheers,

-cvj

I agree with points 1..6. You wrote:

”7) You get some exercise. That 45-50 minutes spent in the gym powerwalking or running on a treadmill? You’d get a lot of that exercise by walking and cycling to the subway/bus stop. It is ironic to me that people have removed regular exercise from their lives by driving everywhere rather than using their bodies to help them move, and then they go to the gym to try to make it up!”

Although walking/cycling is good for you, it’s not really a substitute for ”proper” exercising. If you’re not too old, you really need to get your heart rate up to the 150 range or higher to stay fit. That’s not easy when walking or cycling in a city .

When I walk to university , I walk fast but I don’t really get tired (I’m used to running for half an hour). Even so, when I arrive at my room I often need to change my clothes. It’s hot inside the building; the moment I enter I start to sweat.

-cvj

http://www.usc.edu/isd/archives/la/historic/redcars/

-cvj

Some thoughts: First, these things feed into each other. So the reason that the service is poor is at least partly because people made the choice for convenience. The class system reinforces the poor service (which is not uniformly poor by the way) It is my main point that the system will get better if people showed up to use it and put pressure on it. Also, yes, of course the car is more convenient. But that is not reason enough to use it all the time. I could drive in every day and it would take me 20-25 minutes, even in rush hour. (I can shave another 2 or 3 off if I really push it.) I’d be able to run all kinds of last minute, unplanned, spontaneous errands on the way home. But I choose not to live that way. I think that when one can make the choice (And that is not true for a lot of the city) -i.e., not to the extent that it is a ridiculous waste of time- one should choose to use public transport. It will never be as convenient as a car. That is what people don’t understand….they’re waiting until it is as convenient as a car. People are basically lazy, it has to be said, and everybody is of the opinion that they and their business is really important and so that extra 20 minutes cannot be spared. Let others spare that time. I can see that it is easy to think this way. It is not because everyone else is a bad person….it is just how we are all programmed to think. But one has to move beyond that. There are benefits to taking the path less travelled in this endeavour. The environmental ones are obvious, and so I won’t go on about it again. But there are personal ones and social ones as well. The personal onces I’ve spoken of before, and janet has mentioned one of them….

(1) You get some time in the day to pause.
(2) You get to read a newspaper, book, prepare for a meeting, etc.
(3) You arrive alert and not stressed from dealing with idiot drivers,
(4) You spend a lot less money on gas and parking
(5) You don’t know a city by driving it. Especially LA, sicne most people just go on the highway, and don’t know much about how to get around at street level. I cycle or walk…this is a great speed at which to see the city. Actually, there are some days when I just want to see what’s going on in the various gardens along the way to work, and so I just leave the bike and walk…when I have the time and am in the mood. Or you want to see what the new store or cafe is like…walk by and see the work being done on it, or who’s in there. Staying in touch with your neighbourhood.
(6) You get to talk to real people. This combats fear. Frankly, I find it distressing how many academics and students and other people from my “work” life that I meet know nothing about the vast majority of the people in the city. They are just scary people of colour. They work on the landscaping, or in your garden, and you eat their tasty food and that’s it. You never have to see or talk to them if you get into your car at your house, drive to work, and get out and into your office. I think it would really help our cities and lives a great deal if people got used to sitting next to a random person from the city for ten minutes on the bus or the train. Just watch a father with his kids – that same guy who when you saw him on his own the other night, you thought he was going to mug you- a guy doing his homework on that way back from the local community college, that guy who does your garden, that woman who cooks for the neighbour. Those really funny confused, -but adventurous- scared british tourists who will go home and never use the bus again (but maybe just might if you said hello)…. etc.

This is why (among other reasons) I take the extra 20 – 25 minutes to get to work each day. I need to stay connected.

Further:

(7) You get some exercise. That 45-50 minutes spent in the gym powerwalking or running on a treadmill? You’d get a lot of that exercise by walking and cycling to the subway/bus stop. It is ironic to me that people have removed regular exercise from their lives by driving everywhere rather than using their bodies to help them move, and then they go to the gym to try to make it up!

Ok. I’ll stop, since it is time to do some work.

Cheers,

-cvj

Chantal — I don’t hate LA. I’ve only been there twice in my life, despite living in the Bay Area for my entire life, minus 5 years in Boston, so I don’t have much basis on which to form an opinion. When I was a kid (in the 60′s and 70′s) the hatred of Southern California was largely political, but these days it’s clear that the liberal/conservative divide in California is more of a coasts vs. interior kind of thing than north vs. south, and my sense is that the LA vs. SF rivalry has faded considerably, at least at this end. I can’t remember the last time I heard someone talking about hating LA.

As far as buses vs. cars go, cars are clearly, in most cases, quicker and are nearly always more efficient if you have limited time — for example, if you’ve got a bunch of errands to do around town and absolutely need to be home by 5:00. But public transport has its advantages in the way that you can use the time. My old commute was about 75 minutes each way by public transport (mostly BART). I used that time for reading or knitting. The commute also encouraged at least one 20 minute walk every day. For various reasons (usually because I needed to go somewhere before or directly after work) I drove to work on average about twice a month, which would take me about 35 to 60 minutes each way (and occasionally longer), depending on traffic. On those days I really missed my reading time! Yes, I would substitute listening to the radio, but I find that when I’m driving, especially in heavy traffic, I don’t concentrate very well on what I’m listening to, and I’d often find that I’d zoned out during most of a news story, which meant that if I was really interested in it I’d have to listen to it again when I got home (this is the local NPR station’s infinite news loop I’m talking about). When I took public transport I would generally get home in a much better mood.

Yeah, I’m going to have to agree with that in a lot of ways. I do temp work and I recently got a gig in North Hollywood. Of course, as soon as I accepted the job, I thought about the transportation choices. Take my car (101 > 170, the company was right off the Victory offramp on the 170) with rushour traffic going the opposite way or take public transportation. I’m lucky, I have the MacArthur Park Red Line station on the other side of the park.

However….the one branch of the Red Line that ended in North Hollywood was too far away from the job to walk and the bus line only went from train station > intersection near job, not the other way around because it was only near that intersection for a few blocks (it was a north/south line working briefly on an east/west street). So I ended up taking my car. Sure, I could have done two buses to the train station going home, but it would have meant getting home at after 7:00 pm, instead of the 5:30 pm taking my car. I’m simply not going to spend any more time than I have to commuting to and from work so the train/bus thing lost out.

Sure, there’s classism about riding the bus–and the Westside is totally not representative of the rest of the city–but it’s mainly the issues I outlined above that are the main factor, in my view. The city completely screwed the pooch in the early 60′s when they rejected an extensive rail system in favor of building more freeways because that’s what seemed like the best idea at the time. Now, with the horrible traffic at all times of day–I’ve been parked on the 101 at 2:00 am on a Thursday with no construction or accidents visible–and the increasing pressure on surface street traffic, it’s turned out to be a hideous choice.

Kaleberg, you may be right about the subway, but I just have this nagging feeling that a subway system is simply here is simply not the same as in NYC. For one thing, this place is already built out to the tits with suburbs and exburbs–I always maintain that Los Angeles, despite the existence of Orange County, is really the area from (roughly) Woodland Hills on the West, the 210 > 118 on the north, Long Beach on the south and Irvine up the 57 on the east. Now, sure, I can see a point in a 100 years where everything from Woodland Hills to Santa Barbara and Irvine to San Diego and San Dimas to San Bernardino is totally paved over and developed, but frankly, I’m glad I’ll won’t be around to see that.

But even if that doesn’t come to pass, there’s still the simple fact that the subway will never have the kind of coverage to make a dent in the car culture here. In the San Fernando Valley alone, you’d need subways (at the very minimum) along Roscoe, Sherman Way, Victory, Magnolia and Ventura and that’s just the east/west lines. In the rest of the city, which isn’t so grid oriented, it’s even more complicated.

Right now, Los Angeles transit is a bit raw. I’ve ridden the buses there, but buses have their limits. Subways go faster, but are less likely to go exactly where you want. Real cities need both, and a city the size of Los Angeles needs a subway. It may even need a TGV.

One of the few laws of urban planning states that cities warp to exploit transportation facilities. If you build a canal system, as in 18th century England, you get cities built around canal junctions. If you build a railroad, you get cities, like Atlanta or Chicago. If you build a subway system, it will warp the city around it, using property values as the force vector. This works much as mass warps space and time in general relativity. Over the years, the city will reshape itself to minimize the geodesic.

This process is already starting in Los Angeles, with the increasing popularity of downtown living. Right now, hardly anybody lives downtown, but no one lived in Tribeca or Soho fifty years ago. There are apartment buildings going up along the line near Fairfax, and supermarkets to serve the apartment dwellers, and so on. In fifty years you’ll have Angelenos arguing that they cleverly built the subway to exploit an existing dense linear formation of housing, offices and shopping malls.

But, just as we can recognize how dark matter helps determine galactic form, we can recognize how the subways will have shaped the city.