If she had been killed by a truck going by, the cause of death would have been “motor-vehicle trauma,” and not lack of sidewalks and transit, poor urban planning, and failed political leadership. That was the “aha!” moment for me. Here I was focusing on remote disease risks when the biggest risks that people faced were coming from the built environment.3 Jackson, who has more recently served as California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s state public health adviser, spent the next five years quantifying how so much of what ails us can be attributed directly to the demise of walkability in the
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