pacific nw transportation consortium region 10 Pactrans

A group of international researchers, including PacTrans Associate Director Dr. Anne Vernez Moudon, are publishing a three part series in the British medical journal The Lancet. The series, among other things, claims that automobiles, and the planning and infrastructure that support them, are making our cities sick. Along with Dr. Moudon, another University of Washington professor, Andrew Dannenberg, is co-authoring the first of this series that explores the connections between travel and health and suggests several planning alternatives for better health.

“Most of the negative consequences of city planning policies on health are related to the high priority given to motor vehicles in land-use and transportation planning,” said Moudon. “City planning policies supporting urban individual car travel directly and indirectly influence such risk exposures as traffic, air pollution, noise, physical inactivity, unhealthy diet, personal safety and social isolation.”

Individualized motor travel in cities is the “root cause,” Moudon and fellow authors write, “of increases in exposures to sedentarism, environmental pollution, social isolation and unhealthy diets, which lead to various types of injury and disease outcomes.”

The lead paper suggests eight major interventions that city and transportation planning can employ to make cities more “compact” and promote health. At the local urban design level, these ideas include walkable and bikable environments, shorter distances to common daily destinations, mixing housing with commercial developments and services and making common destinations more readily available to citizens. Parking demand would be managed by reducing its availability and increasing its cost.

“Together, these interventions will create healthier and more sustainable, compact cities,” the authors write, “that reduce the environmental, social and behavioral risk factors that affect lifestyle choices, levels of environmental pollution, noise and crime.”

Funders for the paper authors included Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council and Centre for Excellence in Healthy Liveable Communities, the Australian Prevention Partnership Centre, the Hospitals Contribution Fund of Australia, VicHealth, as well as the U.S. National Institute of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.