Transportation and Health Resource Hub - Land Use

Universal design guide book          

This document provides guidance regarding universal design for affordable housing. Developed with Regional investment partners and funders, the authors worked collectively with a local affordable housing developer to first define and secondly create "universal design"  by applying the guide book principles to new development in the Portland Metro area. The guidelines address a full range of affordable housing topics and demonstrates how to apply them.

Transportation research circular E-C239, arterial roadways research needs and concerns: Informing the planning, design, and operation of arterial roadways considering public health

Arterial roads provide regional and local access to diverse economic and cultural resources that can positively influence community health. At the same time, arterial roads have been linked to various types of cancer, respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, poor birth outcomes, injuries, noise, and air pollution. They represent a prime opportunity for transportation and public health practitioners to work together to directly improve community health. Practitioners can learn from seven case areas covering research questions and salient concerns for practice. The document also includes over 250 questions that could be expanded into formal research problem statements.  

Tennessee’s built environment and health case studies

This collection of case studies in Tennessee, primarily in rural communities, address the integration of health through master plans, corridor studies, sidewalk improvements, multi-modal access, and even a community kitchen. Each short case study (1-2 pages) has key lessons and recommendations that can be used by local advocates, community leaders, and governmental staff to identify strategies for integrating health. These case studies demonstrate the possibilities of integrating health into rural communities and small towns.

Planning a healthy Tennessee

Planning a Healthy Tennessee demonstrates the connections between specific community design features and health outcomes, and provides a real-world example of each feature. While applicable to a wide audience, particular emphasis was given towards its educational use within the design, development, and planning fields. The content is applicable to both rural and urbanized areas. Community design features positively impacting most of the social determinants of health merit consideration by transportation and land use professionals working across the rural-urban spectrum. Many healthy design features already exist in most communities, and they should be expanded on or replicated where practicable.

NCHRP research report 932: a research roadmap for transportation and public health management 

The purpose of A Research Roadmap for Transportation and Public Health is to build upon thebody of literature strategic agendas, and research needs regarding calls for integrating transportation and health and to provide a plan for funding research over the next decade that can lead to greater consideration of health issues in transportation contexts. This report produced recommendations for integrating health into transportation, derived from a research process that involved both stakeholder engagement (including representatives from federal, state, and local transportation and health-related agencies) and a review and synthesis of existing literature (including peer-reviewed literature, grey literature such as reports, conference proceedings, magazines, and other published works). This report identified research needed to support specific agency processes to incorporate health; research gaps and needs and how research is translated into practice; research needed for emerging health issues; priority research problem statements, and developed an implementation plan for guiding research ideas into funded projects.

Healthy community design training

The Healthy Community Design Training made the connection between health and the built environment to transportation and land use professionals across Tennessee. The training demonstrates the strong link between health and community design, shows what makes for health promoting or health defeating community design, and provides policy considerations concerning a range of design features and decisions. The training is primarily intended for presentation to groups of local government officials and employees involved in land use and transportation decisions. Through tangible examples, presenting the Healthy Community Design Training matures the conversation on good community development practices.

Health promoting community design: outline of expected returns

This toolkit provides general findings from project returns of health-promoting projects. With a better informed understanding of project outcomes, practitioners can expand efforts to create healthier and more livable places. This resource demonstrates that health promoting community design features hold the potential to provide economic, health, and ecological co-benefits to communities. Case studies from across the country, consolidated here, provide useful reference for those considering how or why to build healthier communities.

Health economic assessment tool for walking and cycling (HEAT)

The World Health Organization’s Health Economic Assessment Tool (HEAT) for walking and cycling is a user-friendly web-based tool to assess health impacts of active travel. Originally developed for WHO's Region of Europe the tool has been expanded for global use. As active travel inherently results in often substantial health benefits as well as not always negligible risks, assessments of active travel behavior or policies are incomplete without considering health implications. HEAT makes it easy to obtain ballpark estimates of health impacts and carbon emissions related to walking and cycling. HEAT caters to a broad audience of policy makers, advocates, urban and transport planners and practitioners, and researchers alike.

Leveraging the built environment for health equity: promising interventions for small and medium-sized cities (Urban Institute)

This research project identified changes to the built environment that small and medium-size cities can make to promote health and health equity. This document explores ten interventions to improve health equity through land use, transportation, and environmental systems. In addition to presenting these interventions, the document includes 13 promising practices for small and medium-size cities that are focused on how to apply a health equity lens to built environment interventions and how to overcome implementation challenges.

Partnering with metropolitan planning organizations to advance healthy communities 

This resource highlights the importance of transportation to human health, environmental health, and equity. It describes how public health professionals can work in the transportation field to affect health outcomes. Specifically, it describes the role of Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPO) in the development of regional transportation plans and the opportunities for incorporating health into MPO plans and processes.

At the intersection of public health and transportation: promoting healthy transportation policy 

The purpose of this American Public Health Association document is to demonstrate how important transportation is to public health. This resource details the pathways by which transportation affects health, such as physical activity, safety, air quality, and equity. In addition, this document provides an overview of federal transportation programs and spending that are used or can be used to improve health.

Active transportation and real estate: the next frontier

Developers, owners, property managers, designers, investors, public officials, and others involved in real estate decision making can learn from the case studies described in this report to create places that both support and leverage investments in active transportation infrastructure, such as bike lanes and trails. In the process, they can create real estate value and promote economic, environmental, and public health goals.

Building healthy corridors: transforming urban and suburban arterials into thriving places

Building Healthy Corridors explores strategies for transforming commercial corridors—found in nearly every community across the United States—into places that support the health of the people who live, work, and travel along them. This report stems from a two-year project that involved partnerships with four communities in the United States that are working to improve a specific corridor in ways that positively affect health. It serves as a resource and reference for those who are undertaking corridor redevelopment efforts; it highlights the importance of health in decision-making processes; and it provides guidance, strategies, and insights for reworking corridors in health-promoting ways.

Envisioning healthy corridors: lessons from four communities

A supplement to the 2016 publication Building Healthy Corridors: Transforming Urban and Suburban Arterials into Thriving Places, this report describes the experiences of and lessons learned from the four demonstration corridors that participated in the second phase of ULI’s Healthy Corridors project and provides a set of common recommendations from both phases of the project that can be implemented to improve health along commercial corridors. The four corridors are located in Colorado, Arkansas, Pennsylvania and Minnesota. The deep dive into these corridors study discuss the details of each project, results of the study, and the identified the next steps and lessons learned. Lessons learned include looking beyond the corridor and capitalizing on assets that can be used for connections, prioritize areas that contribute to the corridor’s character, the importance of collecting good data for the corridor, consideration of obtaining local control of streets, creating smaller stakeholder groups, considering development of a health impact assessment, using data to develop health related and community goals and priorities, and creating a collaborative agreement between jurisdictions.

Blind spots: how unhealthy corridors harm communities and how to fix them

In the context of transportation networks, urban and suburban arterials are an essential but often overlooked and misunderstood link in a transportation chain, and they have outsized influence on their communities. They often struggle to balance the competing functions of moving cars quickly through a place and moving people to and from shops, restaurants, and other businesses safely. The report team reviews these commercial corridors regarding 1) Transportation 3) Health and safety 2) Economics 4) Equity. The results of the corridor audit are summarized by the overall health of the corridors, regional distribution, difference between urban and suburban corridors, and crash characteristics. Part 2 of the document presents causes and solutions from a policies and practices standpoint, including corridor case study “scorecards.”