County grants Belmont $5000 to build walking trails
from Belmont Patch
By Laura Dudnick
The Get Healthy San Mateo County Task Force has awarded a $5,000 grant to Belmont for the Parks and Recreation Department to build walking trails throughout town. Belmont received the grant on Dec. 8 from the county's health task force, which aims to reduce and prevent obesity and other health risks among children in San Mateo County. Belmont Parks and Recreation Director Jonathan Gervais said the money will go toward helping build some of the city's top 10 paper trails, which were identified and brought before the Parks and Recreation Commission earlier this year. Paper trails, Gervais said, are potential walking trails throughout Belmont that have yet to be turned into actual paths. Read full article

Nutrition and Exercise Programs help East Palo Alto families fight obesity
Peninsula Press
By Julia James
Ofelia Valencia, a Mexican immigrant and 13-year resident of East Palo Alto, doesn’t shop at the grocery store that’s closest to her house, or the store that sells the freshest produce. …“Where the food is cheapest, that’s where I go.”… So throwing away perfectly good items from her refrigerator is not what you’d call a natural tendency for the full-time housekeeper and mother of three. But one Saturday morning in mid-November, that’s just what she did. Valencia’s decision to sacrifice a tasty, if sugary, beverage for the health of her family wasn’t just a personal victory. It took an intricate web of collaboration among local, regional and national players, all struggling to curtail skyrocketing rates of childhood obesity in low-income areas like East Palo Alto. Read full article

East Palo Alto is One Step Closer to a Vision for Ravenswood and Four Corners
by Cathleen Baker
The City of East Palo Alto Redevelopment Agency is working with the community to create a land use vision for the Ravenswood Business District (RBD). The final result of this process, which has been progressing for more than 12 months, will be a Specific Plan, a document that will guide and regulate future development in this area.  With an extensive public outreach process involving thousands of postcards and emails, as well as hundreds of phone calls, East Palo Alto has secured strong attendance at ten meetings and workshops to discuss existing conditions, identify community priorities, explore alternatives, and develop a shared vision for success in the RBD. This has been a robust engagement process, inviting input from diverse participants and incorporating concerns about employment, livable streets, creating a downtown, Cooley Landing, and health. Most recently, after many drafts, workshop participants and Community Advisory Committee (CAC) members developed a compromise land use map, the Community Preferred Alternative (CPA), which moved East Palo Alto one step closer to a vision. On December 1st, the Redevelopment Agency presented the CPA and some suggested changes, at a joint study session of the City Council and Planning Commission. Meanwhile, the Envision Transform Build East Palo Alto Coalition (ETB EPA), led by Youth United for Community Action (YUCA), Peninsula Interfaith Action (PIA), and the Community Development Initiative (CDI), has been conducting a parallel community-driven planning process by engaging community-based organizations in creating a grassroots vision for the RBD. With support from Urban Habitat, ETB EPA conducted several workshops to develop a land use map for the grassroots vision. ETB EPA representatives have been presenting their position, and relaying the values and needs identified through their process during the RBD Plan workshops.  For questions, please contact Cathleen Baker at cabaker@co.sanmateo.ca.us. To submit comments or share what your vision for Specific Plan, contact Sean Charpentier, Project Manager, East Palo Alto Redevelopment Agency at scharpentier@cityofepa.org or (650) 853-5906. To submit comments to or get involved with the ETB EPA Coalition, please email ETB.EPA@gmail.com.

Adding more bike capacity on Caltrain will benefit everyone
from Streetsblog, commentary by Shirley Johnson 
Caltrain recently released a Bike Count and Dwell Time Study, conducted over five weeks during April and May. The study results support bicycle advocates’ position that increasing bike capacity will benefit riders, increase ticket revenue, and simplify operations without a negative impact on service. Caltrain commissioned the study… to assess the impact of a 35 percent increase in bike capacity completed in November 2009.  The public strongly supported a larger increase in bike capacity, but Caltrain insisted on a modest increase, because staff feared that more bicycles would cause dwell time delays, defined as the time trains wait at stations for passengers to exit and board. In the past, bicyclists have been inaccurately assigned as the cause of dwell time delays, because Caltrain rules require bicyclists to board last.The study confirmed that higher ridership, not bicyclists, causes increased dwell time. The more people boarding, the longer the train must wait at the station. This finding is consistent with historical data, which shows that on-time performance deteriorates with increasing total ridership, irrespective of the number of bicycle boardings. Read full article

Studies show connections between travel times to food stores and public health
From The City Fix: Sustainable Urban Mobility
To put it simply, inner city folks in low-income areas have a much tougher time reaching stores because of a lack of integration between land use, transportation and housing policy, as well as issues like redlining in the supermarket industry. Carla Kaiser, senior manager of Community Partnerships at the hunger organization City Harvest has been working on food access in low-income communities for about six years. ”The barriers to healthy food are not just about price,” she says. “A common theme is transportation. City transit and public health planners should work together to make sure urban communities with low rates of car ownership can access major food stores and other health-related venues like hospitals. Read full article

Urban, hip and healthy
From The Sacramento Bee
Hundreds of miles from home, deep in central Mexico, Teri Duarte saw what she hoped might be the future of Sacramento. Duarte, who runs Sacramento County's nutrition program for mothers, infants and children, was in Guanajuato, Mexico. That vibrant city, once a center of the Spanish empire's silver mining industry, has only one street for cars in its central district – one lane in each direction. Almost everything that happens in Guanajuato happens on foot.  "It is a pedestrian community," Duarte said. "The senators walk to their jobs, the housemaids walk to the church, you pick up your dry cleaning on foot. It's quiet. It's socially connected. You can't step onto the street without running into someone you know, which creates safety and social connections. Duarte knows that Sacramento will never look like Guanajuato. But since returning from that trip, her life's mission has been to make her hometown, and the greater Sacramento region, friendlier to pedestrians and bicyclists and less dependent on the automobile. Read full article

Two Belmont after-school programs recognized for healthy awareness
From Belmont-San Carlos Patch 
Two Belmont after-school programs, Footsteps@Cipriani and Footsteps@Nesbit, have received Silver Apple Awards for meeting or exceeding California's healthy school policies, according to San Mateo County health officials. The Silver Apple Awards are part of the "Healthy Apple Awards for Excellence in Nutrition & Physical Activity," which recognize after school programs programs for their commitment to healthy nutrition and physical activity. Read full article

County curbs obesity with after-school programs
From The Daily Journal
Eight after-school programs in San Mateo County were honored for helping promote healthy nutrition and physical activity for children in the 2009-10 school year. “This is the first generation of children who will live shorter lives and have a lower quality of life than their parents,” said Dr. Scott Morrow, county health officer, in a prepared statement. “The growing network of these exemplary after-school programs can make a significant contribution to improving the health of our children." In San Mateo County, minorities are disproportionately obese, including 69 percent of blacks, 74 percent of Hispanics and 83 percent of Pacific Islanders that didn’t meet all of the state physical fitness standards set by the state. The programs honored serve children who struggle with receiving healthy snacks and being active. This also marked the first year any county program received the “gold apple,” which is the highest honor and recognizes programs that far exceed state mandates. Read full article.

How pedestrian! The walking movement flexes its muscle
From Streetsblog
People tend to identify most strongly with things that set them apart. If everyone’s doing something, it hardly seems worth calling attention to the fact that you do it too. Which may be part of the reason it’s been hard for pedestrian advocacy organizations to build a strong identity around walking.  Read full article

Dutch planners school U.S. cities on bikeability
From Streetsblog
In the Netherlands, 30 percent of trips under five miles are by bike. I know, I know, Euro-envy can get a little old. So the Dutch are trying to give us a little less to be jealous of. What if our streets were as bike-friendly as theirs? Read full article

East Palo Alto clinic wins $1.78 million dollar grant
East Palo Alto's Ravenswood Family Health Center is one of just six community health centers in the nation to win a major federal grant to provide disease prevention services for the chronically ill in economically depressed areas. The three-year $1.778 million grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration includes more than $380,000 in its first year to help the community center help poor nearby residents deal with chronic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, asthma and heart disease, Ravenswood officials said. The winners emerged from a field of 231 applicants for grants from HRSA’s Bureau of Health Professions, according to Ravenswood, due to its patient mix and its success in meeting their needs. Read full article

Think public transportation isn't a social justice issue? Think again.
From The Huffington Post
Yesterday after circling back to my house three times in a row on my way to a meeting because of a faulty memory, it occurred to me what a luxury and privilege it is to get four blocks from home and turn around to retrieve glasses and then a notebook -- and still be on time for an appointment. As I got closer to my destination the annoyance and frustration of absent-mindedness gave way to a sober clarity after observing a woman's desperate attempt to flag down a city bus and to witness her devastation and frustration after her failure. The stresses of life were imprinted on her face as she pleaded for the driver to stop and I wondered where she was headed and what it would mean if she didn't get there on time--or at all? Would she be docked for a days pay? Would that affect her ability to make her rent payment? The average middle class person is fairly oblivious and unaffected by the fact that lack of transportation is the number one deterrent to employment and community involvement across the country. Read full article

Green My Parents: Young Americans Making Real Environmental Change 
From Good Environment
For the past couple of years, I've been proudly watching… the blossoming of young activists in the environmental realm. I'm not talking about the "youth climate movement" of college students and recent graduates, which I have written about with a glow. I'm talking about high school (and in some cases younger) students who are using their positions of influence to actually catalyze real change. Usually that means nagging their parents. Nowhere is this tactic more obvious than in the brilliant Green My Parents campaign. Started by 100 young Americans (don't look for one specific name; these kids share the credit!), the program sets out to, in their words, "help young people teach their peers and parents how to work together to help the economy, earn money at home, and save the planet through simple, everyday actions." Read full article 

MTC Awards Spotlight Programs to Educate the Next Generation
From MTC Headlines, MTC Library
Four programs dedicated to helping students make smart transportation choices shared top honors as recipients of MTC's 2010 Grand Award: the Bay Area-based Cool the Earth climate change education program; Marin County's Safe Routes to Schools initiative; the City of San Jose's Street Smarts traffic safety education program; and the Cycles of Change bicycle program in the East Bay. Sharing the spotlight was Darrell Steinberg, president pro tempore of the California State Senate, who was honored for authoring Senate Bill 375 (2008), landmark legislation linking regional transportation planning with the state's greenhouse gas reduction goals. Read more about the winners in the fall issue of the Transactions newsletter and view video profiles. Read full article

The Medical Costs of Obesity
From the National Bureau of Economic Research
The new study, The Medical Care Costs of Obesity: An Instrumental Variables Approach, examines the correlation of obesity with health care costs, and possible causal effects. The potential health care costs of obesity are estimated to be as high as $168 billion a year, or 17 percent of total U.S. medical costs, which is significantly higher than previous estimates of $147 billion.

Lunch Line Redesign - Interactive feature
From the New York Times
School cafeterias are much criticized for offering the kind of snack foods and desserts that contribute to childhood obesity. But banning junk food from cafeterias, as some schools have tried, or serving only escarole or tofu, can backfire. Children and teenagers resist heavy-handed nutritional policies — and the food that is associated with the heavy hand. A smarter lunchroom wouldn’t be draconian. Rather, it would nudge students toward making better choices on their own by changing the way their options are presented.
View an interactive chart of ideas to coax your students into making healthier choices.

San Mateo County kids join global effort, walk to school
From the San Mateo County Times
Children around the world will be walking, biking or skateboarding to school to promote healthier lifestyles. School districts in San Mateo County and local health officials will hold holding activities in support of walking to school. Read full article.

It's time to walk - not drive - to school
San Mateo County will have many participants including Baywood Elementary School in San Mateo. Baywood is planning an extravaganza for its student walkers. Jenny Kuhn, a parent volunteer, has lined up numerous parents to chaperone the walk and almost as many celebrities to cheer the kids on. There will be DJ Jerry McNeil playing music as children approach Baywood, healthy snacks along the way, and stickers which proclaim “I walked to school” for each child. Read full article.

Walking/stepping to school
from the Daily Journal
Walking to school is nothing new, but yesterday hundreds of children participated by taking “walking buses” to class. Beresford Elementary School in San Mateo created four walking bus routes to celebrate International Walk to School Day. The day, which was adopted in all 50 states by 2002, promotes safe routes to school which in turn hopes to create a healthier and greener lifestyle. Similar routes were created in Redwood City, San Carlos, Millbrae, Pacifica, Daly City, Brisbane, Hillsborough, Burlingame, Menlo Park and East Palo Alto. Read full article.

San Mateo County students take part in school farm project
From the San Mateo County Times 
County health officials are working to make hands-on agricultural learning part of the lesson plan for fourth- and fifth-grade students throughout San Mateo County. Within the Cabrillo Unified School District, agricultural studies have already taken root among many students. This year at Hatch and Farallone View elementary schools, students are participating in health and environmental lessons and activities as part of what's known as the HEAL Project, which stands for Health, Environment, Agriculture and Learning.
Read full article

School meals study provides food for thought
SF Gate
A three-year UC Berkeley study shows that students fed a steady curriculum of gardening, cooking and nutrition have significantly better eating habits than children who don't get the same instruction. Read full article

NIH-funded studies aim to prevent, treat childhood obesity
NIH Press Release 
The National Institutes of Health is launching two major research efforts, totaling $72.5 million, to examine ways to curtail the nation’s childhood obesity epidemic. One will study long-term approaches to prevent or treat childhood obesity, and the other will examine community efforts to reduce childhood obesity rates. Read full article

Obesity, diabetes epidemics continue to grow in California 
from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research
A majority of adults in California are obese or overweight, and more than 2 million have been diagnosed with diabetes, according to a new study from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.  Both conditions — which are related to each other as well as to heart disease — increased significantly in just six years, with the prevalence of diabetes alone jumping nearly 26 percent between 2001 and 2007.  The "epidemic" of obesity and diabetes leaves no racial, ethnic, economic or geographic segment of the state unscathed, according to the researchers. Read full article.