In Louisville, Ky., projects that might normally pitched as good for the planet are being funded because they're good for people, too.
Money from private and public investors is going towards building bike lanes, funding community gardens, and increasingly walkability in low income neighborhoods. The motivation behind the investments is not to reduce carbon emissions, but to increase community health.
In the Louisville area, more than six in ten people are overweight, and Kentucky, which has the 7th highest obesity rate in the nation, recently had to fend back lobbyists who wanted the state to allow food stamps to be used in Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. (We have no words for this level of corporate evil.)
Investors like the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation are hoping that people will eat more healthily and spend more time walking or biking. A convenient side effect of their investments, though, is that their methods for reaching those goals will leave the city with a network of buses with bike racks, linked with parks and parkways, which will be in turn linked with an 100-mile walking and biking loop.
