Jun 23, 2024
As an undergrad, Daniel Fuller didn’t have a car, nor was he
keen on taking the bus.
“I rode my bike to university every day in the fall and then
just kept on going and never stopped,” said Fuller, a former
national and international canoe/kayak athlete.
As he pedaled, Fuller watched the way people used trails,
sidewalks and roads.
“I really started to get into active transportation, how
people move around cities and how we can get people active --
outside of the sport environment,” said Fuller, now an
associate professor in Community Health and Epidemiology at the
University of Saskatchewan.
Fuller moved to Montreal for his doctorate as the city
launched its bicycle-taxi program.
After the widespread installation of shared-use bicycles,
Fuller observed no changes in collisions or crashes. However,
a significant number of people started to combine biking with
walking, and public transit.
Fuller said Montreal succeeded because the city went big,
launching more than 5,000 rental bicycles at 405 docking
stations.
“They work on network effects: people being able to find them,
people being able to use them, and integrate them with their
mobility,” said Fuller.
His goal is to link active transportation in urban planning to
measurable gains in public health outcomes.
“If we implement a bike lane, how much health benefit is
there? Or how many health dollars might we save? Because health
care is our biggest expenditure provincially, and if we can
save money on health, then that's really, really important.”
For almost everyone, Fuller said five to ten more minutes of
walking each day would be “extremely beneficial.”
“It improves mental health, reduces depression, improves type
2 diabetes, improves chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and
prevents certain forms of cancer,” he said.
Technology plays a big role in Fuller’s work. From 2016-2022,
he was a Canada Research Chair in Population Physical Activity at
Memorial University, and he remains a Principal Investigator on
the INTERventions,
Research, and Action in Cities (INTERACT) team.
He’s studied wearable devices to assess their accuracy, and
how much they motivate people to stay physically
active.
“The
jury's kind of out on that," said Fuller, who noted Fitbits and
Apple Watches tend to give users an initial activity boost, which
fades after a year or two.
Instead, he said population density is far more effective in
raising the number of minutes people move each day.
Fuller said city planners rely on traffic counts to decide
whether or not an intersection should be expanded or changed — but
there’s virtually no information to accurately quantify sidewalk
use, or the health costs of urban sprawl.
As the co-principal
investigator of the CapaCITY/É Healthy Cities Implementation
Science Team, he’s trying to get a detailed handle on why some
cities succeed with active transportation, while others
struggle.
"There’s a whole political hierarchy,” said Fuller. “Who's
paying, how much are they paying, how fast does it have to happen,
all these kinds of questions that we don't have good generalized
kind of science about yet.”