The War on Walking and Biking — And Who's Fighting It (Tepi McLaughlin)

8:53PM Sep 8, 2025

Speakers:

Kea Wilson

Keywords:

War on walking

War on biking

Physical activity

Transportation reform

Enemies of physical activity

Policy influence

Active transportation

Passive opposition

Structural determinants

Industry opposition

Urban sprawl

Couch potato narrative

Individualism

Policy change

Advocacy.

Kea. Hey guys, it's Kea. Welcome to the break.

So if you've been in the transportation reform advocacy game for a long time, you've probably heard that there's a war on cars going on, and you might have even been accused of waging one, just for speaking up for things like bike lanes, sidewalks and overall dignity for people who get around in other ways besides driving. But what we don't talk about as much is the idea of a war on biking and walking, much less the specific people and industries who are responsible for creating a culture where basic physical activity is the exception to the car culture rule. And my guest today argues that maybe we should be talking about those enemies, because it's important to know thy enemy if we ever want to change the status quo. In a fascinating new paper, Dr tepey McLaughlin teamed up with previous guest of the break grant Ennis, I really recommend going back and listening to his show to write about what they call, collectively, the enemies of physical activity, particularly in the transportation realm. And as Dr McLaughlin will explain on this show, he's not talking about mustache twirling villains who want to see whole populations glued to steering wheels and TV screens for no reason. He's talking about corporations and government entities and other powerful people who might even support the local soccer team or sponsor a fun run or encourage the development of a new gym, all while pushing for policies that make accessing basic physical movement in the public realm harder for more and more People, and as we dig into who these enemies are, we also dig into what shifts in our advocacy when we start naming these enemies as enemies, and when we start thinking about culture as a product of policy, and we also talk about what it will take to win. It's a fascinating conversation. I learned a lot. So let's just dive in. Here is my conversation with Dr tebby McLaughlin. Tebby McLaughlin, welcome to the break. How are things in Australia right now? Besides very late.

Thanks, Kea. Yeah. Things are good. It's been a little bit blustery this week in Perth, the longest city in the world and also the most isolated city in the world.

Wow, well, isolated, but reaching out to the world with great research, and that's what we're here to talk about today. You and friend of the podcast, previous guest grant Ennis co wrote a paper that I thought was really fascinating about the enemies of physical activity. We're going to break down what that means, but let's just start a little bit with the genesis of this paper. Why did you and grant get together to talk about not just you know, why it's so hard to get more folks around the world, walking, biking, using active transportation, and more just active mobility in general, but actually, who's actively opposing it? Tell me how this all came about.

Yeah, I've been in and amongst this physical activity world, which is the walking, the cycling, but also the kind of sport and exercise side of things as well. For Yeah, my whole career and I've become increasingly entwined with the way we increase population physical activity is to make it as convenient as possible, so it's embedded in our natural daily lives. And I think this paper came about as we had a really interesting story. Actually, I was in grants neck of the woods in Paris for the International Society for Physical Activity and Health Congress last year, and over 1000 delegates attending that conference. And there was a really interesting moment that really captured my attention, which was somebody had asked a question of one of the keynote speakers, and they'd said, Who are the enemies of physical activity, and this was in the context of the keynote speaker had been talking about competing interests and some industry interests working against physical activity. And that question of who are the enemies, it was met with this awkward laughter from the audience, a kind of awkward laughter That was unwilling to accept that we perhaps do have competing industries that would perhaps perceive they would lose profit from actions to increase population physical activity. So what might that be? It might be something like removing laws that ban me. Mixed use developments, and who would lose out? Well, we can talk about some of those things as we flesh this out. Kea, but yeah, it was a really interesting moment for me that it didn't feel comfortable acknowledging that we have enemies or competing industries in physical activity, whereas we probably do quite easily recognize that we do have competing industries for other public health issues like tobacco control or junk food.

Yeah, so let's unpack a little bit like, Why do you think you had that awkward laughter in the room at that conference? Why do so many people think that physical activity is inherently a political when folks like you and I have spent a lot of our careers, in fact, researching the political barriers to getting people moving. Where does that assumption come from? In your view? I think

to some extent it comes from a good place, where people are saying we need to use positive message framing, where we say we need to do all of the good things we need, more bike lanes, more trees. Let's be positive about this. And to some extent that thinking around positive message framing has perhaps misguided us to ignore the structural determinants that is an industry influence. So if there is going to be an organization that where they perceive their profits might be harmed, then they're going to be a noisy opposition to that policy that might increase population physical activity. So let's take the road lobby as an example. They profit from laws that result in more driving where this is not no news. People that listen to this podcast. In order to overcome this, we need to acknowledge that we Yes, positive message framing has a place, but we do have to acknowledge that there are structural determinants that we need to unpick as advocates and researchers.

Yeah, so let's sort of start picking those apart a little bit. So you talked in the paper about the idea that there is both an active and a passive way of opposing physical activity at the population level. Walk me through some of the examples maybe that you've already given. You talked about the auto industry and land use planners and things like that. What does active opposition to physical activity look like, and what does passive opposition look like

so active would look like a submission completely opposing a policy directly. And the reason won't be because it will increase physical activity. It will be for some profit, harming potential reason behind it, the more indirect one is perhaps an example of that is where corporation would support a certain type of physical activity, such as organized sport, for example, where we might expect a car manufacturer, it might support sports or organized sports, but perhaps wouldn't support the change to the land use or the transport physical activity that may potentially harm their profits. So certain types of physical activity also get promoted over others by these industries, and that's a form of passive opposition to the population high impact strategies that would increase physical activity and also give people that opportunity to live in the environments that they want to live in. This is about giving people access to neighbors that they want to live in, streets that are easy to cross, that have good social connection, access to shops close by, and the the industries work a really crafting way to oppose such developments.

Yeah, you forever change the way I will look at like an a car dealership sponsorship of a fun run or a stadium like ever again. I never really thought about it quite in that way before I read this paper that you know, the idea that physical activity is something you do at a sporting event or in a gym only is actually something that's pretty common and can be used to obfuscate just how much we're reserving physical activity to people who can afford access to those private spaces that usually have to pay to enter. So really interesting point there. I wanted to ask if there are any less obvious enemies of physical activity that we need to be alert for. So you've mentioned again, auto dealers and automotive interests. You've mentioned like folks who are writing our policies that make our neighborhoods less navigable on foot, bike and other active modes. Who else comes to mind, who might be a little bit more under the radar? Yeah, and

I think we've got to unpick some of these as well. That's what we've called out in the paper and understand their tactics further. But say, for instance, a an industry that profits from the laying of cables to distant urban sprawl, housing, energy cables, pipes, concrete companies that benefit from this, road construction companies, they're all ones that benefit from that sprawl. Another one would be when a energy company or a transport company lobbies for petrol subsidies that make petrol. All cheaper or or gas, as you call it, in the in the States, gasoline subsidies, they're all again, working to make driving cheaper and therefore the more convenient option over walking and riding or public transports. Another one would be parking companies that lobby for no parking levies. I think a really interesting one would be the housing industry, when they lobby for more land on the urban fringe to be rezoned for sprawled, low density housing. So property developers that really want that land that they own on the absolute urban fringe to be rezoned for housing. That's a really key determinant of subsidizing that distant urban sprawl housing, like I said at the top of the show, Kea, I live in the longest city in the world, which is an unfortunate title for Perth. It's 170 kilometers long now, and it's continuing to sprawl north and south along the coastline because of subsidies that are provided on the urban fringe. And those subsidies have been worked out to be about $90,000 per house, paid for by the taxpayer, and that's things like building the schools and the infrastructure that's needed, or north and south that already exists in the inner areas, but having to build it on the extremities, providing the roads out there, providing the schools, providing the hospitals. That all adds up and tallies up to about $90,000 extra per house that for the cost of the taxpayer. So there's a nice example, I suppose, of one cost that the taxpayer has to bear of this sprawl.

Thank you. Yeah, those examples are really good, and they really drive home for me how important it is not just to say these are folks who are proponents of sprawl, proponents of gas guzzling, proponents of automotive sales, but they're actually opponents of something, and whether or not they intend to be, and many of them do intend to be. I want to turn to one more kind of the cultural side of the coin that you mentioned in the paper. So, like there's one line that kind of stood out to me. You said that there is a quote industry driven neoliberal narrative of the couch potato lifestyle, individual choice and laziness. I'd be curious to hear a little bit more about, you know, of the kind of constellation of people you've been talking about. Whose Do you see pushing that narrative? Who do you think created it, and how have they reframed the decline of physical activity in countries like ours as an individual problem, rather than a systemic one,

a really big organization, I suppose that has led that sort of narrative of individualism, for just get out there and be active, is the old just do it. So I won't say who it is, but just do it. We can all think of who that is, but there's obviously many exercise related industries that profit from exercise focused things. And I'm not saying that that's necessarily a bad thing. Of course, getting out and deliberately going to exercise is great if you've got access to the time to do that. And that is a real privilege, I suppose. And what we're saying at a population level is that giving people the access to that time is what's needed. We need to alter the laws and the subsidies that mean that people don't have access to that time. So there is that narrative of individualism and just get out there, bootstraps narrative for physical activity. But the reality is is it just doesn't shift the needle on population physical activity. We know that globally, we're off track for physical activity targets only 17 countries going in the right direction, the other 150 plus that they measured all either off track or plateauing. So there's a real need to increase physical activity won't be achieved by the JUST DO IT narrative. Of course, we all know that if people listening to this podcast know that we need to actually provide the environments and the structures that underpin physical activity to make it more convenient for people to walk, rise, take leisure time, activity, exercise. So for me to summarize that conversation is it's it's been a growing trend towards that individualism narrative in physical activity, and what we want to do is avoid reinforcing that narrative by talking about say things like couch potato or lazy, or other words like lifestyle or it's your choice to be active. I even Kea. I even avoid one of the words you use, and I certainly used it myself over the years, but I avoid the word culture now, because culture is driven by policy, the idea that certain people in where you live, Kea and where I live, are inherently different and have an inherently different culture. When it comes to physical activity, there's a. Only minuscule parts of truth to that might be religious related or such like. But the real determinant is that the environments are different. The policies are different, the laws are different, our land use laws, our the fuel tax, which we have, all of these things that influence our physical activity levels, in a subliminal way, are different.

Yeah, I hear that, and certainly I spend, you know, 99.9% of my reporting life writing about policy rather than culture. But I did think about, as I was reading this paper, things that feel more purely cultural to me, and you can push on me where I'm wrong. Like, you know, when you hear enemies of physical activity, I think about stigma too. I think about, I'll date myself very specifically. Hear songs like no scrubs by TLC, that you know, kind of shame people for walking rather than having a car, or have a car but you're walking, you're a scrub, or like, the glorification of folks who can afford particularly expensive cars and the degradation of folks who rely on public transportation. I mean, to what extent, like, I can see where those are mostly products of policy. But isn't there some element of culture in there? Isn't there some element of like, interpersonal, family to family, friend to friend, reinforcing the stigma that we do.

I'd argue, not going back to the argument like, are we inherently different? It's not wrong. What you're saying that that's how people feel, but the way that people feel is influenced by what is legal, what is subsidized. So take, for instance, advertising of cars and how they can be advertised. That's a subliminal influence on the culture, like the upstream determinant of the culture is how we design what's what the guard rails are on these things. It used to be culture that you'd walk into a pub and everybody was smoking. Everybody was, you know, lighting up cigarettes. We now wouldn't really dream of that in most countries, and we've had to repeal laws that enabled that over time. And I think that's the an example of where you can see the shifting culture has been driven by the policies. And I think that's, I suppose, what I'm getting at with this. So it's not denying that that policies manifesting culture, but the the real thing is, is that policies are driving that culture, rather than culture being this thing that we're inherently different. I hear it all the time. Oh, you know, drivers in Western Australia, are the worst drivers ever, and it's just nonsense. We're not inherently different in Western Australia. It's the policies.

Yeah, I think every single city in the world thinks that they have the worst drivers too. It's something that you hear all the time, but that's a really good point about how to the extent that culture exists. It is a mirror for policy. It is a byproduct of policy. It is downstream, at least of policy. And I mean, as we're talking I'm also kind of curious about another policy aspect that we haven't discussed as much, which is, you know, is there basically, is there a broader menu of people who are enemies of physical activity, or broader menu of interests, I should say that we haven't talked about yet when we're talking about, particularly the couch potato narrative and this narrative that, like, you know, I'll speak just for Americans, because that's what I know are, you know, addicted to their phones and They never go outside. I always think about the corporations that want us to be addicted to our phones, that have, you know, in the policy choices that we've made that have put a, essentially, a phone in the dashboard of every car, and have allowed us to be extraordinarily reliant on particularly stationary, non active technology. I mean, do we need to talk about the broader ecosystem of tech companies in this conversation? Is that something you thought about where you while you were writing this

paper? Absolutely think what you touched on there, Kea is the alternate problem definitions for why we're not active, and that is certainly, you know, the screens issue. Let's just unpack that one. I think our screens have become more addictive, and got laws coming into place in Australia at the moment around sprawling video content on social media and banning it for children in Australia, recognizing that that is a highly addictive form of social media. I don't think those types of policies are being thought about in a physical activity context, specifically, more so in a giving children some time back to learn to be independent and to avoid bullying and those types of things. But yes, that's absolutely the types of industry. That would push back on such a policy, because they make the advertising money from those things. That's their job, is to profit from those things, and that's why I don't blame the industries. That's not the problem. I blame the guardrails that we and so that's where we need to get organized and change those guardrails, change those subsidies that the companies are receiving, and push back on those industry influences, then we can do it. Cities around the world, hundreds have achieved zero road deaths. They've done it by introducing policies that, such as safer speed limits, not by just asking people to drive better or not speed or you know that individual narrative of you know it's your fault that road deaths are happening, so please drive better. That narrative doesn't work. So they've shifted the narrative towards we need to change the policies to support a safer road environment. Helsinki being the latest example of zero road deaths Wales, introducing the country wide policy of 20 miles an hour on local streets. These are, you know, life saving and large swathe projects that have had a lot of industry opposition that has coalesced into media opposition as well. But soon as you introduce the policies and you start seeing the benefits, of course, all of that disappears and people start to realize the benefits that the Wales is a great example. They found the insurance premiums have dropped for people, and there's been less crashes, less road deaths started to emerge as well. So all of that starts to go well, how did we ever not have that policy in place? It kind of starts to feel like the tobacco story. Where did we actually used to smoking pups. Whoa, okay, right? Well, that just feel normal in today, today's society, and I think these types of policies, when they're first introduced, they feel a little bit uncomfortable for some, and that is right, the framing of the industry that makes us feel like that.

The phrase that keeps coming to my mind as I read this paper and as I talk to you, is an accusation that's leveled against me and everyone like me all the time, which is that you're waging a war on cars, right? Like, how do we put up the guardrails that you're describing, identify and organize against the enemies of physical activity without being accused of being enemies of automotive travel, which is absurd on its face, I'm an anti car dependency advocate. I'm not an anti car advocate. I own two of them in my household, you know, and it's an important tool for modern life. Do you have any thoughts on how we thread the needle when it comes to talking about enemies and talking about organizing in a more effective and targeted way without alienating people who here, even being a proponent of physical activity is evidence that you're waging a war on cars. I don't know if that makes sense, or maybe we don't need to worry about it. Maybe the the we should just forge ahead with this and build power regardless. I'm curious to hear what you think of that.

I think the first thing to say is, I think we, in response to the we don't want to sound anti car argument is what we don't want to do is, then just lean in like we started at the top of the podcast, lean into all of those positive and only positive things that We can do. You know, more trees, more footpaths, basically more stuff, additive stuff, which is, again, I'm not saying those things are bad. We need those things to make the environment better. But if we go up a level from more trees, more footpaths, we go to the level of the policy of as to how the land use starts. That's what we need to get organized on. We've gotta get organized as advocates together and unpick the priorities undermining a more active town. Because I think what we do at the moment is we say all of these things are important. We've gotta do everything. There's all the different arguments flying around at the same time. But if we can get organized on a single or a very small number of high priority things that need repealing, just like they did with the tobacco playbook, and they got organized on several things that needed to be changed to support tobacco control. That's what we need to do here with active towns and active places.

Beautifully. Said, Okay, Tepi, you've been really generous with your time tonight. I guess it's very, very late where you are. What else haven't I asked you before I let you go? What do you want? An advocacy focused audience who wants to see compulsory car dependency and in the United States and around the world. What do you want them to know about this paper, and what do you want to

leave them with? I'll leave with a very sort of concise statement, which is that we're doing a very good job of asking for the good stuff. And. And now it's time that we put the end to the bad stuff that's undermining some of the good stuff that we're asking for.

Okay, that's our show. Thank you so much again. To my guest, Dr tepey McLaughlin, you will see a link to this paper that he wrote with Grant Ennis in our show notes. It's really a quick and fascinating read that I think is very provocative and sent me down a lot of rabbit holes when I was thinking about it. And I hope you check it out too. If you found this podcast provocative and it sent you down a rabbit hole, or even if you just enjoyed it, you can support the show in a few different ways. You can make a tax deductible contribution@usa.streetsblog.org that is our parent company. You can leave a positive review on Spotify, Apple podcasts or anywhere else you listen, or you can just tell a friend about the show and tell them to tune in. The break is a production of streets blog USA. I am your host and editor. Kea Wilson, our theme music is eggshells by Christina Johnson, and before I let you go, same question as always, what is one thing you have done today to end universal car dependency? Let me know you.