Remember when the Great Northwest was one of the remaining corners of the nation where you could pack your granola bar, put on your hiking shoes and trek away from it all?

Millions of pristine wilderness acreage remains, but there's also a greater chance a move there will cause you to die fat, become road kill and contribute to thinning the population of salmon, gray wolves and caribou.

The third edition of Sightline Institute's "Cascadia Scorecard 2006: Focus on Sprawl and Health" -- a regional gauge of progress -- examined the connections between urban design and leading health risks such as car crashes, obesity, and physical inactivity and, thanks to sprawl and fossil fuelisness, the findings are enough to make you sick -- literally.

It's not first time sprawl and its car-driven lifestyle has been associated with an early demise. Similar findings however typically point to older metropolitan areas that have no where to go but out into the hinterlands, stretching the infrastructure thin and paving over the environment.

But even in the Great Northwest, residents of low-density, residential-only sprawling communities are more likely to die in car collisions, which kill around 2,000 Northwesterners a year; and they are also more likely to be obese, which increases the risk of many chronic, potentially fatal diseases, the report says.

But Northwesterners can look no further than to their neighbor to the north where Canada's British Columbia has the region's best record for curbing sprawl. It has a car crash fatality rate that's one-third lower than the rest of the region and an obesity rate that's nearly one half as great.

The report found:

Published: July 5, 2006

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A journalist for 35-years, Broderick Perkins parlayed an old-school daily newspaper career into a digital news service offering editorial content and consulting services. Perkins' San Jose, CA-based DeadlineNews Group includes the flagship news site, DeadlineNews.Com, offering real estate, personal finance and consumer journalism, and a backshop, the Deadline Newsroom.