There are many reasons to be concerned about sprawl – it eats up open space and wildlife habitat, it drives up the cost of municipal services as the population spreads out. A new study provides a more personal reason – it’s bad for your health.

People who live in sprawling communities tend to have more health problems, especially asthma, headaches and arthritis, than those who live in denser communities with interconnecting streets, according to an article in the October issue of “Public Health,” the journal of the Royal Institute of Public Health in England. The study’s lead author, Roland Sturm, is a senior economist at the Rand Corp. in Santa Monica, Calif. Living in a sprawling area is equivalent to taking four years off residents’ lives, the researchers concluded.

The reasons are twofold. The primary problem with areas with lots of sprawl is that walking – to stores, jobs, schools – is not easy because of the distances between these entities and the fact that busy streets, rather than sidewalks, often connect them. As a result, more people drive to get around, thereby increasing air pollution.

Although the study of 8,600 American focused on 38 metropolitan areas, the findings are applicable to Maine. The most recent census found that Mainers are spreading out and as a result spending more time in their cars. The average commute time in the state, according to the 2000 Census, was 22.7 minutes, up from the 19 minutes it took people to drive to work in 1990.

While commutes generally tend to be longer in crowded southern Maine where people seeking a bit of privacy and land are moving to small communities but continuing to work in Portland, Portsmouth or Boston, some of the state’s longest drive times can be found in Penobscot County where many residents are flocking to newly built homes in former farming communities. Others have been put out of jobs by shoe factory closings and paper mill downsizings, and now must come to the city to earn a living.

The longest average commute time in the state for towns with more than 500 workers was from Bradford, a small community about 20 miles northwest of Bangor. The average time for that community was 40.8 minutes, up substantially from 31.9 minutes a decade ago. The town’s population increased 7.5 percent between 1990 and 2000, while the population of Bangor decreased 5.1 percent. Many other rural communities around Bangor also grew in the last decade.

As people spend more time in their cars, and less time walking, they get heavier. Those with extra weight tend to have more health problems.

A solution, suggested by the study’s authors, is to design communities where a person can easily walk from his home to a store, a park or even to work. Such dreamers, these researchers.