Effects of Transportation, Land-Use and Built-Environment on Health

Urban transportation planning and land-use policies play a pivotal role in every society and are the subject 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 important issues. In addition to travel time, congestion, safety, energy and environment, public health is an important subject that is affected by transportation, land-use, and the built environment. Transportation planners are interested to know if transit usage could decrease the risk of heart attack, high blood pressure, or obesity. They also like to know how different the health conditions of people living in urbanized areas are from those living in rural areas, or how pedestrian-friendly environments could decrease the chance of high blood cholesterol or asthma infection. The primary objective of this study is to develop models for different health-related variables including General Health, High Blood Pressure, High Blood Cholesterol, Asthma, Obesity, and Heart Attack to investigate the effect of transportation, land-use, and the built environment variables along with demographic and socio-economic factors on the healthiness of people. In this study, the relationship between health-related variables and other variables are explained with binary probit models for each case. It was shown that increasing the Transit-use and decreasing the Auto-use has significant ositive effects on all the health variables except for Asthma. Every percent increase in Transit-use would decrease the risk of Obesity and Heart Attack by 0.29 percent and 0.07 percent, respectively. It also increases the chance for a person to be Generally Healthy by 0.09 percent. A 0.26 percent decrease in High Blood Pressure and a 0.18 percent decrease in High Blood Cholesterol risk would be expected by every percent decrease in Autouse. In addition to transit-oriented development, making the environment more pedestrian friendly, by increasing the block size or decreasing the population density could motivate people to be more physically active in their daily routines and have a healthier lifestyle. It also has the potential to decrease the burden of medication costs for the whole nation.

کلیدواژه ها:

Health ، Transportation ، Built Environment ، Land-Use Planning ، Physical Activity ، Binary Probit Model