Transportation and Health Resources

Transportation plays an important role in people's health, safety, well-being, and quality of life. Recognizing this, ITE is collaborating with Streetsmart to develop the beta version of this research synthesis, resource clearinghouse, and communication platform. Over the past year, Streetsmart convened several focus groups in planning, engineering, and public health to find out more about the challenges of integrating health into transportation. Here is what the 35 focus group participants, drawn in part from the Institute for Transportation Engineers, the American Public Health Association, and the National Association of Regional Councils, had to say.

In recent years, the concept of sustainable development is increasingly appearing in various spheres and contexts. In the broadest sense, sustainable development can be defined as the concept of social development, whose core is the satisfaction of society's needs in a way that does not reduce or in any way limit the development potential of the generations to come. Successful implementation of sustainable development ideas should be reflected in decent life for all inhabitants, social inclusion, increased environmental responsibility, and efficient economy and prosperity in accordance with the constraints of the planet.

Transportation’s Role in Public Health Transportation plays an important role in health, well-being, and quality of life. The transportation system provides access to goods and services critical to health such as affordable/healthy foods, health care, education, and career opportunities. Active transportation options are known to increase physical activity, reduce obesity, and lower rates of disease. Transportation is a top contributor to urban air pollution, with major impacts to respiratory and lung health. The transportation system has a significant impact on the health of our communities.

A desire to protect and enhance public health has motivated improvements to arterial roads and corridors. There are countless “on the ground” examples that illustrate this. In 2016, the Urban Land Institute (ULI) published a report on its Healthy Corridor Project describing how four communities in the United States implemented improvements along specific corridors with the goal of making positive changes in the health of the people who live, work, and travel along them. The improvements targeted health by expanding the set of relevant issues to include food access, physical activity, economic opportunities, and affordable housing in addition to pedestrian and bicycle safety.

President's Message: Leading the Way to Make Active Transportation Safe While Improving Health

Active Transportation Users Seize the Day to Set Safe Speed Limits

ITE’s Role in Integrating Transport & Public Health - Paper

ITE’s Role in Integrating Transport & Public Health - Presentation

How Transportation Touches Health

Transportation systems influence our lives every day, shaping where we live, work, learn, and play. Public health protects and improves the health of people and communities, with a focus on prevention. Transportation also plays a central role in community health, determining residents’ access to jobs and to essential goods and services, such as affordable and healthy foods and medical care. Thus, where transportation inequities exist—disproportionately in low-income communities and communities of color—they can negatively impact health.

As federal and state funding increasingly emphasizes economic and “triple bottom line” (economic, environmental, social/health) return on transportation investments, there is a need for methods to evaluate that return, particularly since the recession. For example, a key criterion of the Transportation Infrastructure Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) program (which funds capital investments in surface transportation infrastructure) is that the project can demonstrate generation of economic development. The 2010 Government Accountability Office report on statewide transportation planning found that, “in selecting projects, states assigned greater importance to factors such as political and public support than to economic analysis of project benefits and costs.”

Each year, more than 30,000 people (more than 80 people every day) in the United States die from something that is preventable. More than 2 million more people are injured annually. What is behind these deaths and injuries? Traffic crashes, or as most people call them, accidents. While not a disease, collisions are certainly a growing public health crisis.

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” the adage by Peter Drucker goes. This especially holds true in transportation planning, where funding, forecasting, and political backing often rely on quantitative evidence of need and potential for improvement. In a field where data collection for vehicles is robust and often required, walking and bicycling are underrepresented. To effectively track and advocate for active transportation infrastructure and programs, having a set of performance measures directed towards these modes is essential. Active transportation performance measures enable comprehensive evaluations of walking and biking projects based on quantitative data.

In 2016, transportation engineers, planners, advocates, and policymakers continue to face a rapidly changing landscape of communities calling for new solutions. Technological advances, societal shifts, energy demands, and demographic changes are requiring new strategies to safely and efficiently move people and freight. Challenges must be met through the combined application of resources, technology, and partnerships. Cross-discipline efforts to meet these challenges are on the rise. This article examines some of the recent and ongoing local, national, and international initiatives and programs that are inspiring new transportation approaches to cross-discipline topics such as public health, safety, and community building. ITE members are encouraged to spread the word about these initiatives in their own communities and answer the calls to action.

There is a new approach to collaboration in motion in the field of active transportation planning: one that harnesses many of the quickly evolving technologies changing how planners collect information and communicate. It’s called “crowdsourcing,” which can be described as the process of obtaining information, insight, and knowledge from user-generated data provided through web and mobile applications. Crowdsourcing has already taken many different forms and served a wide variety of transportation planning purposes, from identifying new bike share station locations and collecting personal travel data using GPS to mining data from personal fitness apps for travel patterns.1,2,3 Access to high-quality data in greater quantities and at finer spatial resolutions, as well as new capabilities for direct communication with community members, offers important new options for listening to bicyclists and pedestrians and working with them to better understand their relationships with the built environment, their travel decisions, and their needs.

On August 10, 2010 WSDOT started operation of one of the first Active Transportation Management system in the nation. The system has been in operation for almost four years. Over that time a lot has been learned on how best to operate the system. In addit

The Transportation 2040 Plan for the City of Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada, provides residents, businesses, and visitors with a clear vision of the transportation priorities for City staff in the years ahead. When Vancouver’s City Council approved the plan in 2012, specifi c targets for mobility were set—walking, cycling, and transit will account for at least 50 percent of all trips by 2020, and at least two-thirds of all trips by 2040. Safety also became an even greater focus as the Council passed another goal to work towards zero traffi c-related fatalities.

Transportation and healthcare. Most people would not expect a strong association between the two and, on the surface, they are worlds apart. But as a transportation engineer in a multi-discipline planning and design firm that serves both the transportation and healthcare markets, I see the connection more and more every day. Both teams have an end goal of improving quality of life, and of course a well-designed hospital can create a very direct path to better health. But if you look at things from a slightly different angle, you see that well-planned transportation initiatives can also significantly support public health. How? By creating safer roadways for drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians; improving air quality; and encouraging active, healthy lifestyles.

The economic and social impact of physical inactivity on the United States is staggering. Adverse effects of urban sprawl, segregation of land uses, and reliance on single occupancy automobiles for urban mobility are contributing factors to this pervasive problem. People make a considerable number of urban trips, less than 2-miles in length, predominantly by automobile rather than more sustainable “green” travel modes such as cycling, walking, and public transit. Green travel modes requiring increased levels of physical activity are positively correlated with improved public health outcomes, as well as improved economic and social outcomes. Land zoning policies that have historically led to separate land uses between residential, commercial, employment, and institutional facilities further contribute to this problem. When combined with transportation infrastructure that heavily favors travel by automobile, urban areas systemically suffer negative impacts pertaining to traffic congestion, mobility, livability, quality of life, equity, environmental resources, community wellness, and public health.