Billie Giles-Corti

It's because we know that, I mean, there's no surprises.

If you live in a walkable neighbourhood, people walk more.

No surprises.

Now, there's a couple of reasons why that's important.

It's very good for people's health.

If there's one thing that people can do to support their health is to be physically active.

And walking is a fantastic way of doing that because you can, it's very easy.

It's not a problem to do it.

You don't need any special equipment.

And it's really one of the best things you can do.

So that's from a personal point of view, it's very good.

But it's also really important from an environmental point of view because we realise now that we all have to change our behaviour in relation to climate change and emissions from transport are very high.

So from an environmental and an individual point of view, I always like to say that there's one thing you can do for your health is to be physically active.

It's like the magic bullet.

I think that's a really good point.

I've always thought that the Heart Foundation should have a checklist to remind people what they're looking at.

Because if you have to drive, you buy a so-called affordable house on the fringe of a city, but you have to run two or three cars to be able to live there because there's nothing nearby.

And as a result of that, the cost of that, the RAC in Australia has just estimated that it costs around $23,000 a year for a car.

Now, the cost of doing that, if you've got two or three cars being run or the fuel or the maintenance or the upkeep of the vehicle, if you lived in a suburb which was more walkable and there was very good public transport, that's key to it because you want to have access to good public transport.

You can reduce the amount of transportation costs that you have.