How walkable is your village?

Amber Mendiola is the administrator for the NMI hospital’s Non-Communicable Disease programs and recently examined that issue under a new walkability initiative.

"Physical activity or inactivity is a risk factor for diabetes, hypertension, cancer. And that's what a lot of our people are being diagnosed with and passing away due to," she said.

She added, "And so we decided we were going to do our best to look at like policy systems and environmental change strategies for that, which is how walkability came into play."

She says a 2016 NCD and Risk Factor Hybrid Survey found that 40% of adults in the NMI are not doing any physical activity. They want to change that by improving infrastructure.

"And so what we found was that basically just on the crossings there were 51 crossings in Saipan alone. And 80% of those crossings did not have any walk signals which is really scary, if you think about it, because that means that both the pedestrian and the driver would not know sometimes whether or not somebody was crossing. 54% had no pedestrian signs and 80% had no crosswalk marks whatsoever," she said. 

She says residents on Tinian hope to implement a “walk to school” program and Saipan could see what they call a “complete streets bill” to improve walkability for all walks of life.

She did, "In order for us to really see this uptick in physical activity, decrease in chronic diseases, improvement in pedestrian and vehicle relationships, all of that stuff, we're definitely going to need to address it at a policy level. And in a systemic level in order for us to see change in infrastructure."

She says they’re preparing to host community design sessions to piece together what each precinct needs to get on their feet.