Modeling Health Equity in Active Transportation Planning

Understanding the public health impacts of transportation plans can provide stakeholders with valuable information that can aid in the selection of alternative transportation futures. Active transportation (i.e. walking, bicycling, and some public transit trips) can improve public health through increased physical activity. The Integrated Transport and Health Impacts Model (ITHIM) has been applied around the world to understand changes in public health that will result from the adoption of plans that support active travel. However, the model does not provide disaggregate information required to evaluate the social equity implications of such changes. Health benefits are typically reported as a single value (i.e. total reductions in deaths) at the county or regional level. In this work, the authors draw from several data sources to report demographically explicit (i.e. race/ethnicity and income) results from an ITHIM implementation that the authors developed for the Sacramento region in California. This disaggregation is helpful because travel behavior and health outcomes are affected by race/ethnicity and its correlates (e.g. residential location) and planning agencies are required to ensure that their policies and projects are not discriminatory. The results demonstrate that the fundamental insights of ITHIM can be applied to different racial and ethnic groups, providing decision makers with the information needed to target interventions to achieve outcomes for disadvantaged populations. They also pave the way for further spatial disaggregation.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADD50 Standing Committee on Environmental Justice in Transportation.
• Authors:
  • Wu, Yizheng
  • Rowangould, Dana
  • London, Jonathan
  • 0000-0001-5478-0880
  • Karner, Alex
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2018-1-7 to 2018-1-11
• Date: 2018

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 8p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Disaggregate analysis; Equity; Health; Nonmotorized transportation; Travel behavior
• Uncontrolled Terms: Physical activity
• Geographic Terms: Sacramento (California)
• Subject Areas: Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Planning and Forecasting; Society;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01658074
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 18-04932
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Jan 26 2018 9:47AM