Transportation and Health Resource Hub - Safety
Michael, J.P., et al. (2023). A Safe System Guide for Transportation: Sharing this Approach to Lead Your Community to Action. AAA Foundation
This AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety report provides techniques that can help communities across the nation to introduce and implement the Safe System concept and its principles. Specifically, this guide focused on how to effectively communicate with the public about why Safe System policies and engineering approaches are necessary, how they work, and how they benefit everyone who uses the roads. This guide is designed for decision makers, transportation professionals, and safety advocates working at the community level.
An Active Roadmap: Best Practices in Rural Mobility. (2023) Smart Growth America 
Beginning with definitions of the types of rural communities—such as gateway communities, resource-dependent communities, or tribal or Native American communities—this report identifies the unique needs and challenges of building safer, sustainable, and equitable transportation networks. Strategies and case studies for healthier, connected, and safer rural communities completes the report.
The Safe Systems Pyramid: A New Framework for Traffic Safety. (2023) Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives.
This article challenges the way that engineers and health practitioners have traditionally considered addressing safety concerns that produce health evaluators. It challenges the three E’s being Education, Enforcement, and Engineering and suggests that an improved way to evaluate the relationship between engineering and health is the “Safe Systems Pyramid” approach which consists of Education, Active Measures, Latent Safety Measures, Built Environment, and Socioeconomic Factors in descending order. This article continues to describe each of these factors and provides examples of how they can be applied in a real-world context. In conclusion, this “Safe Systems Pyramid” approach links transportation practice to public health for the purpose of evaluating Vision Zero and other traffic safety programs. Practitioners can 1. Prioritize countermeasures; 2. Assess the population level impact; 3. Determine whether individual effort is needed; and 4. Support efforts that address the social determinants of health, all using the same framework.
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.
Metropolitan planning organization ideas to improve and provide more walking and bicycling projects
The initiatives spearheaded by the MPOs profiled in this guidebook have resulted in more walking and bicycling projects in communities across the country. The enclosed case studies, illustrating eight distinct strategies, provide inspiration, ideas, and replicable tactics for MPOs to emulate or consider. Eight case studies explain how regions have implemented walking and bicycling projects. The cases detail contextual factors, partnerships, timelines, steps in the decision making processes, and how communities dealt with barriers to implementation.
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.
Considering health in US metropolitan long-range transportation plans: a review of guidance statements and performance measures
Transportation influences health primarily and most directly through traffic safety, air quality, physical activity, and accessibility. Despite the importance of all four components, only safety and air quality are typically considered during institutionalized transportation planning processes. This paper assesses how health impacts are considered in transportation planning by focusing on the long-range transportation plans that US metropolitan planning organizations develop. By assessing the state of the practice and discussing potential approaches, this review informs a stronger and more comprehensive consideration of health within the institutionalized structure of US metropolitan transportation planning.
Children’s transport built environments: a mixed methods study of associations between perceived and objective measures and relationship with parent license for independent mobility in Auckland, New Zealand
This mixed methods study investigates whether parent perceptions of the neighborhood environment align with objective measures of the neighborhood built environment, and how perceived and objective measures relate to parental preferences for children's independent mobility (supporting active travel and physical activity). Parental preferences for independent mobility was only associated with a need for safer places to cycle (positive) and objectively assessed cycling infrastructure (negative) in adjusted models. Overall, the study findings indicate the importance of safer traffic environments for children's independent mobility.
Integrating health and transportation in Nashville, TN, USA: from policy to projects
This journal article describes the integration of health into regional transportation planning, scoring criteria, policy, project prioritization, data collection, modeling and funding. This transformed $7 billion worth of transportation spending in the greater Nashville area, prioritizing health and equity over volume and speed of cars on roadways. It is possible to positively address health in transportation policy and funding. Transportation agencies can think creatively to include health in data collection and modeling.
The integrated transportation and health impact tool in Nashville, TN, USA: implementation steps and lessons learned
This article describes the implementation of Integrated Transportation and Health Impact Tool (ITHIM) in greater Nashville, TN, and the important lessons learned. ITHIM is a scenario planning tool that sets active transportation targets and calculates the resulting positive or negative impacts on population health. ITHIM also has the capability of monetizing healthcare savings from averted injury and disease. This resource provides a methodology for MPOs and state DOTs to calculate the potential health impacts and healthcare savings from increased walk, bike and transit trips.
Framework for better integrating health into transportation corridor planning
The Health in Transportation Corridor Planning Framework is a detailed worksheet to help practitioners incorporate health into corridor planning studies at every stage of the planning process. It can be used within an existing corridor planning process and is flexible and adaptable to many different issues and contexts. Cases studies from the five transportation agencies that tested the Framework Five transportation are available here.
Metrics for planning healthy communities (APA)
Inside this "Metrics for Planning Healthy Communities" report is a set of Healthy Planning Metrics that can be used to assess, measure, monitor, and report progress toward healthy planning goals. Key built environment indicators and policies are identified for five healthy communities domains to promote health and measure health inequities. This document encourages planners and allied professionals to think about the different domains of health that they influence through their work.
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.
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.”