Last week, the Columbus Partnership, a consortium of the city's corporate executives, gave CBus a road map to improvement. The "Benchmarking Central Ohio 2009" report is the third annual survey comparing Columbus and central Ohio to 15 other metropolitan areas in more than 60 categories. The 15 comparison cities include Cleveland, Cincinnati and other similar Midwestern cities and also cities Columbus should aspire to rival, including Austin, Raleigh and San Diego.
As you might expect, Columbus ranks well in certain categories (logistics, unemployment rate, libraries and volunteerism) and not so well in others (poverty rate, the arts, small business startups and venture capital).
And in one category, germane to this blog, Columbus finished DEAD LAST.............obesity. That's right, Columbus has the highest obesity rate of the 16 cities surveyed. About 30% of adults in central Ohio are obese, up from 25.6% just two years ago. After all the exercise, dieting, wellness programs, New Year's resolutions and gimmics like "The Biggest Loser," we keep going the wrong way fast.
This trend is disturbing on multiple levels. It will drive up local health care costs and drive away businesses. Given a choice, what company wants to locate in a city where its employees and their children have a 1 in 3 chance of becoming obese? We need to reverse this trend NOW!
Us twowheelers are convinced that alternate transportation is a big part of the solution. In cities around the world and the U.S. where citizens use alternate transportation, they are not obese. It's that plain and simple. And alternate transportation has other significant benefits to the community and the environment.
Kudos to the Columbus Partnership for commissioning this report which tells the community what it may not like, but desperately needs, to hear. Hopefully, the significant efforts underway to promote alternate transportation in CBus will get traction and move the dial in the 2011 benchmarking report.
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