Health Impacts of Urban Development and Transportation Systems
Publication: Journal of Urban Planning and Development
Volume 136, Issue 3
Abstract
Urban transportation planning and land-use policies play a pivotal role in every society and are the subjects of interest in many academic fields. Creating a tool that measures the benefits and costs associated with the built environment, which includes the surrounding land-use and transportation system, would allow decision makers to choose the best option available to them when deciding on those important issues. In addition to travel time, congestion, safety, energy, and environment, public health is an important subject that can be affected by a transportation system. The primary objective of this study is to develop models for different health-related variables including general health, obesity, high blood pressure, high blood cholesterol, asthma, and heart attack. This is to investigate the role of transportation, land-use, and the built environment variables along with demographic and socioeconomic factors on people’s health. The results of the analysis showed that increasing the transit use and decreasing the autouse have a significant positive impact on all the health variables except for asthma. It was found that every percent decrease in autouse would reduce the chance of obesity by 0.4%, high blood pressure by 0.3%, high blood cholesterol by 1.3%, and heart attack by 1%. In addition to the transit-oriented development, making the environment more pedestrian friendly could motivate people to be more physically active in their daily routines and have a healthier lifestyle.
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Acknowledgments
The writers would like to thank Dr. Yong-Ping Zhang for providing part of the data used in this study. The writers are also thankful to three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions to the first draft of this paper.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Urban Planning and Development
Volume 136 • Issue 3 • September 2010
Pages: 208 - 213
Copyright
© 2010 ASCE.
History
Received: Nov 10, 2008
Accepted: Sep 18, 2009
Published online: Oct 2, 2009
Published in print: Sep 2010
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