Electric cars won’t fix sitting: The health costs of designing cities around cars

Medical Xpress January 8, 2026
Inga Kiderra, University of California - San Diego

Commuters feel this in their bones—time spent in traffic is bad for your health.

UC San Diego urban planner Lawrence Frank quantified that intuition 20 years ago. In a 2004 study, which was among the first to link neighborhood design and public health, he found that every additional hour a person spent in a car raised the odds of obesity by 6%, while each kilometer walked lowered them by 5%. Widely covered by the media, that study helped reframe “car time” for the public as a form of unhealthy sedentary behavior, and it also helped launch a wave of research on how cities shape our well-being.

How car time impacts public health

Now, two decades later, Frank revisits that work...

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