Subscribe to the RSS feed.Upstream Public Health Releases Health Impact Assessment for Transportation Policy
By: CHP | Posted on: June 2nd, 2009 | 
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Categories: Air and Water Quality • Economic Issues • Policies and Laws • Public Health • Rural Health • Transportation • Urban Issues
Late in 2008, Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski presented his “Jobs and Transportation Act of 2009” to the Oregon House and Senate Transportation Committees. The Governor’s office stated that the plan would create thousands of jobs, establish funding for a statewide transportation system and help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
But read through the entire Act and you might notice that one important word was missing from the entire document.
The missing word is “health.”
The word “health” also happened to be largely absent from the Governor’s entire State of the State speech from on May 15, 2009. He did say “health-related agencies” once, and “health care” and “health insurance” a few times, but never did he refer to the health of the population or use the word healthy…to say nothing about terms like “social determinants of health,” “environmental health,” or the “overall health of Oregonians.”
Helping to focus our public conversations back on health, Upstream Public Health has recently released a study it commissioned – with funding from Northwest Health Foundation – to look at how some key provisions of the Governor’s transportation policy proposal might actually affect the health of Oregonians.
The study was a collaboration between Upstream, Oregon Health and Science University, Human Impact Partners, and a health and transportation advisory committee. The process employed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidelines for health impact assessments, which are increasingly used to inform policy decisions and help promote decisions that are most beneficial to human health.
The full report can be found here.
Upstream’s Health Impact Assessment ultimately concluded that several proposed policies can have a positive impact on health. These policies (many of which may seem obvious) include:
• Improving the existing pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure in neighborhoods
• Requiring new developments to be mixed-use and highly dense with good connectivity to the rest of the city or town
• Requiring that business in metropolitan areas charge a fee for employee parking.
• Increasing and promoting use of public transit.
According to the Assessment, “while all these policies will affect health differently, together they can maximize the benefits to health, shift travel away from individual driving, and decrease vehicle miles traveled.”
The study further concluded that creating affordable neighborhoods that are high-density. mixed-use and highly connected will make people more active, decrease air pollution and reduce car crash fatalities. Employer parking fees would promote health more than a gas tax or a vehicle-miles-traveled tax because it would actually shift people away from driving to public transit. And driving-related taxes may disproportionately impact low-income, elderly or disabled individuals. If taxes are put into place, significant revenues from them should be re-invested in low-income communities.
Isn’t it about time that the consideration of health was incorporated more broadly and more frequently into our public projects?
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It’s interesting that the recommendation for health is to increase and encourage public transportation, because right now TriMet is contemplating service cuts that will make it harder for many in the Metro area to commute via bus/light rail. I wish that health impact assessments were done for service cuts as well as proposed new development.