To repeat: Surgeon General calls for public health gains through walking and walkable places.

It's worth saying again, again, and even again -- even though we did so just a few days ago.

Surgeon General: building walkable communities is essential to our health, by Michael Russell (Transportation for America)

 ... Designing cities and towns to encourage walking involves smart planning of public transit and cycling infrastructure because both amenities extend the range that the average citizen can walk. Smarter transportation planning puts the majority of a person’s needs within walking distance, from errands to school, work and everything else. And the more we walk, the better our mood, the safer our streets and the healthier we become.

Tyler Norris, vice president of Total Health Partnerships at Kaiser Permanente, one of the many guests on hand to extol the benefits of the Surgeon General’s call-to-action, closed the day with some inspiring words about the numerous benefits of walking. Walking, he said, is good not only for individuals, but for communities:

“We were born to walk. Our bodies are designed to walk. There is nothing we can do that is simpler or more cost effective for our health and well-being than walking. Nothing is a better contributor to creating a healthy community than to make the public and private investments that are essential for the infrastructure for walking and rolling [in wheelchairs] throughout our communities. Every mayor and economic development leader will tell you that a walkable community is also a more economically vibrant and prosperous community.”

Let's try to make "walking American again."

If we designed ourselves into this box, we can redesign ourselves out of it. What must come first is an overt, open state of intent: This WILL be a walkable (and bikeable) city, and here's how we are going to proceed toward the goalposts.

The government is trying to make walking American again, by Emily Badger (Washington Post)

The U.S. Surgeon General on Wednesday proposed a radical idea wrapped in a banal government document, a 72-page "call to action" with 359 tiny-font references: Americans, Vivek Murthy said, should walk more.

We should walk to the grocery store, and to school, and to the bus stop. We should take "walking meetings" at the office and spend more time walking in parks. And, because nearly a third of American adults report living in a neighborhood without a single sidewalk, we should rethink how we design communities so that it's actually possible to walk them.

Maybe this sounds like obvious advice, a health tip right up there with admonitions to eat right and wear sunblock. But for much of the last century, the federal government has backed a different idea — cars running on cheap fuel and fast asphalt should carry us everywhere — that has largely proved incompatible with walking.

C. Everett Koop: "Then, strikingly enough, he changed."

Did the office make the man? It seems that once C. Everett Koop was elevated to surgeon general, he was able to separate his personal views from the requirements demanded by the job. As Perlstein observes, "You don’t see his like much any more, in that there Republican Party."

C. Everett Koop, 1916–2013, by Rick Perlstein (The Nation)

A decent enough interval has passed, I hope, to begin to think about an interesting figure of our recent history in a bit of a critical temper. C. Everett Koop died on February 25 this year, the former surgeon general of the United States, between 1981 and 1989—the only person to hold that title to have become a household name, not least for his goofy half-beard and his charming insistence on wearing his ceremonial brocaded Gilbert-and-Sullivan-style uniform everywhere. But also for, it has to be said, serving as an exemplar of honor and courage in a dishonorable time.