The University of British Columbia’s School of Population & Public Health has developed a research program focused on the investigation of factors that encourage or discourage bicycling, transportation infrastructure associated with increased or decreased risks of cycling injuries, and air pollution and cycling.  The program website links to full-text versions of the studies it publishes and to “study brochures,” which summarize study results.  One recent study, published in the journal, Injury Prevention, examines the impact of transportation infrastructure at intersection and non-intersection locations on bicycling injury risk.

The U.S. Department of Transportation John A. Volpe Transportation Systems Center will present “Measuring Walkability: The Health Question” on May 7, 2013 at 11:00 a.m. CT.  Led by Ann Forsyth, professor of urban planning and director of the Masters in Urban Planning program at Harvard University, the webinar will address the questions:

• Does the design of a neighborhood affect the level of a person's physical activity?
• Do people who live in more compact areas get more physical activity than those who live in sprawling neighborhoods?

The event is free but advance registration is required.

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) are collecting information and input from the public on priorities around increasing walkability.  The Office of the Surgeon General will use this information as a call-to-action to increase physical activity through walking among Americans. For more information, see the notice in the Federal Register.

The deadline for submitting information is May 1, 2013. More information is available in the Federal Register notice and the Every Body Walk Collaborative campaign. Organizations may submit comments through either site.

The Walk Friendly Communities program has created a new guide to help communities become more pedestrian friendly.  “Giving Cities Legs: Ideas and Inspirations from Walk Friendly Communities” highlights efforts from communities that sought Walk Friendly Community status during the program’s first three rounds.

Growing out of the guide book, “Steps to a Walkable Community,” which we wrote about in a previous post, America Walks and Sam Schwartz Engineering have created a new website, www.walksteps.org.  The website is an “online resource for developing strategies toward walkable communities,” with tactics and case studies that communities can use to help them in their efforts to become more walk-friendly.  The website allows users to create and share specific tactics in a “My Tactics” page.  The tactics are organized under the following six categories:

• Advocacy
• Policy
• Land Use
• Design and Engineering
• Encouragement and Education
• Enforcement

The National Complete Streets Coalition (NCSC) has released three new presentations that are available for individuals and communities to use and/or adapt to help inform and educate others about complete streets.  The first, “Introduction to Complete Streets,” covers the basics on why Complete Streets are needed.  "The Many Benefits of Complete Streets" addresses the value that a Complete Streets approach can add to your community.  Lastly, "Complete Streets: Changing Policy" outlines and describes the basic elements of an ideal Complete Streets policy. Each presentation includes citations and presenter notes.  In addition, see NCSC’s factsheets covering various topics that are related to and can potentially be addressed through complete streets.

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Volpe National Transportation Systems Center, in partnership with the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), has published a white paper that develops a framework for metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) to use to integrate health into the metropolitan area transportation planning. The framework addresses both how MPOs can approach health as a general, broad-based goal in comprehensive and interdisciplinary planning and also how MPOs can consider health during all stages of the metropolitan transportation planning process.

The report explores how health can effectively be incorporated in metropolitan transportation planning through case studies of the following four regional agencies:

• Nashville Area MPO
• Puget Sound Regional Council (PSRC)
• Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG)
• San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG)

Active Living Research has released three research briefs summarizing recent studies of policies, programs, and practices that support walking and bicycling to school.  The first brief covers the impact of state laws on walking and bicycling to school.  The second brief examines the connection between state spending of Safe Routes to School funds and the implementation of projects at the local level that support safe, physically active trips to school.  The third brief looks at the impact of Walking School Bus programs on children’s pedestrian safety behaviors.  Full-text copies of the studies, all published in Health & Place (Vol. 18, Issue 1, January 2012, pp. 8-30), are available through ScienceDirect.

Researchers at St. Michael's Hospital and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Toronto have published a study in the journal Diabetes Care, examining the connection between neighborhood walkability and diabetes.

The study looked at data from more than one million residents to assess the impact of neighborhood walkability on diabetes incidence for long-term residents relative to recent immigrants, and found that neighborhood walkability was “a strong predictor of diabetes incidence independent of age and area income, particularly among recent immigrants.”

Drivelesslivemore.com is a web-based program, developed by the Regional Transportation Authority and Active Transportation Alliance, designed to reduce traffic congestion and improve air quality by shifting local travelers from drive-alone car trips to healthier, active, more sustainable travel modes: transit, cycling, walking, carpool, vanpool, water-taxi and telecommuting. 

The website aims to accomplish this goal by encouraging modeshift through prize drawings, competitive Employer Challenges, and direct employer engagement:

• Users sign up and create a profile.
• Users self-report their trips via an interactive Trip Tracking Calendar.
• Transit, cycling, walking, carpool, vanpool, car-sharing, and telecommuting trips are awarded a point score: each one-way trip using at least one of these travel modes receives a score of 0.5 points. 
• Points are used to enter drawings for prizes.
• Users can also create and join Employer Challenge teams to compete against other similar workplaces, by category, in several commuter challenges per year.  Winning teams in these commuter challenges will be publicly recognized.
• Employers (via an authorized user) can create a customized homepage within drivelesslivemore.com (yourcompanyname.drivelesslivemore.com) through which they can directly encourage employees to change travel habits and measure the results with Workplace Travel Planning.  Workplace Travel Planning may help lower costs and increase productivity, through happier and healthier employees.

On November 10, 2012 from 8:45 a.m. to 12:00 noon, the Chicago Healthy Kids, Healthy Communities partnership is hosting a Regional Park Zones Summit on November 10, 2012 at the Nature Room of the Humboldt Park Boat House (1400 North Sacramento Avenue, Chicago).  Anyone in the region who’s interested in learning more about Park Zones and their implementation is welcome to attend.

This summit will highlight efforts in Chicago and suburban municipalities to make parks and trails more safe and accessible, especially through traffic-calming infrastructure improvements.  Public administrators, planners, and professionals in the Chicago metropolitan area will have an opportunity to share and learn from others’ experiences implementing park zones.

The event is free but attendees should RSVP to Andres Alvear (andres@activetrans.org or 312-427-3325 x 296).

America Walks, a national coalition of local advocacy groups dedicated to promoting walking and walkable communities, has launched a new program to work with communities around the country to increase walking and walkability.  The program allows America Walks to bring workshops, technical assistance, and other support services directly to local communities.  The program, called “Walking in America,”  is funded by the National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).  Half-day and 1.5 day workshops are available.

The National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has devoted the August edition of its Vitalsigns™ report and associated Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) to walking and the health benefits walking can provide.  The CDC Vitalsigns™ webpage calls attention to the lack of physical activity among many adults in the United States, the need for more, the role of walking in helping to meet this need, and finally the ways in which governments, organizations, and individuals may help increase walking.

The MMWR examines data gathered in National Health Interview Surveys from 2005 and 2010 in order to assess changes in the prevalence of walking among groups with different demographic, health, and geographic characteristics.  Overall, the report finds an increase in the prevalence of walking.  The report concludes that to sustain increases, communities should “implement evidence-based strategies such as creating or enhancing access to places for physical activity, or using design and land use policies and practices that emphasize mixed-use communities and pedestrian-friendly streets.”  The report argues that  walking for transportation and recreation can help improve the health of U.S. residents.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has developed an online resource, the Health Economic Assessment Tool (HEAT) for walking and cycling.  The tool estimates the economic savings resulting from reductions in mortality as a consequence of regular cycling and/or walking. Simply put, HEAT calculates an answer to the following question: "If x number of people cycle or walk y distance on most days, what is the economic value of mortality rate improvements?"  While default parameters are set for the European context, they can be adapted to various situations.

The Association of Bicycle and Pedestrian Professionals (APBP) will host a webinar, “Emerging Technologies for Bicycle and Pedestrian Planning,” on January 18, 2012, from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. CT.

The cost is $50 per site for APBP members and $75 per site for non-APBP members.  Register online.  For more information, contact Debra Goeks (262-228-7025 or deb@apbp.org).

The official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Pediatrics, published an article evaluating the impact of a “walking school bus” program on children's rates of active commuting to school and physical activity. The study found that the walking school bus program increased active commuting and daily moderate-to-vigorous physical activity.

The complete study is available for download on Pediatrics webpage for a $12 fee.

The Transportation Research Board’s (TRB) Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, No. 2190 is dedicated to bicycles and contains six papers that explore various topics related to bicycle transportation and planning, including:

• The influence of the built environment on route selection for bicycle and car travel
• Automated bicycle counts
• Multimodal travel choices of bicyclists
• Effects of gender on commuter cycling and accident rates
• On-street bicycle facility configuration effects on bicyclist and motorist behavior; and
• Parking lane width effect on bicycle operating space

This volume complements the volume on pedestrians, which we featured in an earlier post.

An article in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, seeking to quantify benefits from reducing automobile usage for short urban and suburban trips, finds that reducing these short automobile trips and replacing them with active transport would yield major health benefits.  The authors estimate that, for the 11 metropolitan areas of the Upper Midwest, shifting 50% of short trips (less than 8 kilometers) to bicycle would yield a yearly savings of approximately $3.8 billion from avoided mortality and reduced health care costs, and the combined benefits of improved air quality and physical fitness would exceed $7 billion per year.

On Wednesday, October 12, the National Center on Senior Transportation and Easter Seals Project ACTION present the webinar, “Promising Practices and Solutions in Accessible Transportation: Public Involvement in the Transportation Planning Process," from 1:00 to 2:30 p.m. CT.

The webinar will address the importance of public involvement in the transportation planning process and is designed for transportation planners and advocates, as well as aging, educational, and human service agency staff and administrators.

The webinar is free, but space is limited, and requires advance registration by October 7.

An article published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) looks at the health impact of Barcelona’s public bicycle sharing initiative, Bicing.  Launched in 2007, by August 2009 Bicing had 182,062 subscribers, representing 11 percent of Barcelona's municipal population.  The average distance traveled by a Bicing subscriber on a working day was 3.29 km (approximately 2 miles), taking an average of 14 minutes.

The study estimates the risks and benefits to health of travel by bicycle, using a bicycle sharing scheme, compared with travel by car in an urban environment.  While using a Bicing bicycle for transportation did very slightly increase the chance of death from road traffic incidents and from air pollution, this was completely offset by the large health benefit resulting from the physical activity inherent in cycling.  Overall, the benefit to risk ratio was 77, with an estimated 12.28 lives saved each year through the use of the Bicing program.  In addition, the authors estimate that annual carbon dioxide emissions in Barcelona have been reduced by approximately nine million kg through the implementation of Bicing. 

The authors conclude that the health benefits for users of public bicycle sharing initiatives such as Bicing in Barcelona far outweigh the risks and contribute significantly to a reduction of carbon dioxide emissions in the city.

See a related Chicago Tribune story about the City of Chicago's bike-sharing plans.  The CMAP Weekly Update from September 23 has more information.