There are many reasons smarter growth makes sense. By building more sustainably and closer to where people work and shop and plan, we reduce hours stuck in traffic and make it easier to reach life’s necessities.

But there is something even more important at stake: our health. According to new data from the American Lung Association in California, smart growth policies can prevent 140 premature deaths and 105,500 asthma attacks every year in that state. The figures resulted from looking at a proposed 2035 planning scenario for California that prioritized more compact and sustainable development with better transportation options.

Changing how we build and plan would also relieve our communities of $1.66 billion in public health costs. It would also prevent:

•    260 heart attacks
•    215 acute bronchitis incidents
•    95 cases of chronic bronchitis
•    2,370 asthma attacks
•    101,960 other respiratory symptoms
•    205 respiratory ER trips and hospitalizations
•    16,550 lost work days
•    132,190 tons of criteria pollutants

Chelsea Allinger discussed the link between smart growth and active living over at Smart Growth America:

Like many Americans, I grew up knowing only one type of community design — drivable suburbia. In my community, exercise wasn’t something that happened naturally over the course of the day. It required carving out designated time slots from a crowded schedule.

Frankly, that didn’t happen as often as it should.

Since that time, I’ve learned that cultivating a more active lifestyle doesn’t have to mean finding a 25th hour in the day. Moving to a walkable, mixed-use, smart growth community quite literally changed my life — with, as it turns out, more significant health benefits than I’d initially realized.

Here is Dr. Sonal Patel in Capitol Weekly, discussing why many of her colleagues in health care also see the connection:

Most California cities were designed to make it easy to drive and park cars. Homes were separated from stores, workplaces and other commercial activities. The unwitting result was sprawling cities that maximize the amount of miles we drive and the time we sit idling in traffic and that minimize healthier options like walking, biking or public transit.

In the past decade, California has been on the cutting-edge of efforts to build more sustainably and closer to transit. In 2008, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed SB 375, which required local communities to include greenhouse gas reduction targets in their land-use and transportation planning policies.

A healthier transportation system for America’s kids requires change in federal policy. But change will remain out of our grasp absent a sense of urgency from the everyday people on the ground.

The need for a meeting point between policymakers in Washington and citizens in their neighborhoods was evident in today’s roundtable on childhood obesity, titled “Keeping Kids Moving,” sponsored by Transportation for America, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center to Prevent Childhood Obesity, The Convergence Partnership and PolicyLink.

We’re facing an epidemic of childhood obesity and poor health, and as a few people pointed out, this could very well be a generation of children who live shorter, less healthy lives than their parents if we don’t act now to change things.

The shape and structure of streets, sidewalks and the ability to safely use them has an enormous impact on whether children become overweight or obese. Kids get more physical activity and lead healthier lives when they can bike and walk to school, play in local parks and reach recreational opportunities with ease. Among American children between the ages of 10 and 17, 32 percent are overweight or obese, and many are at risk for more serious conditions like type 2 diabetes, heart disease and stroke. Obesity rates are disproportionately high among low-income and minority children.

In search of a solution, many routes invariably lead to transportation policy.

During the panel, several federal officials stressed the need for partnerships that cross departments and jurisdictions, with Roy Kienitz, undersecretary for policy at the Department of Transportation quipping, “transportation is too important to be left to transportation professionals.” Kienitz also emphasized the need for Americans to speak up and utilize the democratic process, noting that “the distance between the top [at DOT] and that sidewalk on your street is vast.”

Chip Johnson, mayor of Hernando, Mississippi, knows just how much of a difference one repair can make. As part of a broader push to repair his town’s streets, Johnson oversaw the pouring of concrete for a new sidewalk right outside his office window. On the old, cracked sidewalk, Johnson used to see a handful of pedestrians every morning, but he saw dozens more walking by once the improvements were completed.

“People want to exercise,” said Johnson, a Republican first elected mayor in 2005, adding that it’s up to officials like him to provide them the chance to do it.

keepkidsmoving2 Originally uploaded by Transportation for America

While people like Undersecretary Kienitz, Special Assistant to the President Martha Coven and others are moving the levers where they can in Washington, local officials like Johnson are stepping up and refusing to wait, behavior encouraged by the federal officials who were present.

Nashville Mayor Karl Dean didn’t wait for Washington. He made safe and accessible streets for all users a top priority and hired a director of healthy living initiatives — Adetonkunbo Omishakin, also a panel participant — to help make it happen in Nashville. Child wellness advocate Julia Lopez, herself a teenager, didn’t wait either. Along with being an instigator of change on the ground around her home of southern California, she has traveled the country to bring a youth perspective to the obesity challenge, calling on elected officials to step up and help make healthy transportation the norm, not the exception.

It’s clear that these advocates on the ground and policymakers at the top can meet in the middle to make real change, but it will take continued pressure on Congress from both ends to get the job done.

This is a great start, but there’s an omission: the task force has not emphasized the potential role for the U.S. Department of Transportation. The link between physical activity and the built environment is well established – transportation practices strongly influence physical activity and health outcomes for Americans of all ages.

An active living approach to physical activity incorporates walking and bicycling into everyday activities. Forty years ago, more than half of children walked and bicycled to school, contributing to exercise and good health. Today, less than 15 percent of children walk or bike school, with the rest ferried by school buses or car.  Children who have access to safe, convenient and ample walking and bicycling opportunities in their community develop active transportation habits that can last a lifetime.

Michelle Obama has been a positive role model for children and a leader in promoting healthy habits. Let’s make sure the influence of transportation and the built environment are a part of the Let’s Move effort. More walking and biking = healthier kids.

You can see Transportation for America’s comments on the First Lady’s task force here.

Our transportation investments and the built environment — what we build and where — have an enormous impact on our health and the cost of our health care.

With the debate over health care reform dominating the news daily, Transportation for America and coalition members from across the country took that powerful — yet often ignored or neglected — message to Capitol Hill leaders.

T4 America’s “health fly-in” last Friday connected health professionals and advocates from across the country with their Congressional representatives to highlight the impact that transportation has on our health and wellness.

T4 America kicked off the day with a briefing from campaign director James Corless and four other nationally recognized experts on health and transportation. Then, participants from across the country, from the Pacific Northwest to New England, split up and took the message to their representatives, visiting a total of 37 Congressional offices.

Among the 25 participants in the fly-in, six hailed from national groups and 19 from state and local organizations. Several, including fourteen-year-old childhood wellness advocate Julia Lopez and UCLA professor Dr. Richard Jackson, traveled all the way from California. (Look for a full list of organizations at the bottom of the post)

During the meetings, advocates discussed how the built environment — where we live, work and play — has a profound impact on obesity rates, diabetes, asthma and other quality of life measures. And they discussed policy prescriptions that can increase walkability, grow transit ridership and make physical activity a normal part of our daily routine.

“As a pediatrician and child advocate, my job is to do what I can to make sure as many kids as possible live healthy lives, and the biggest threats to them at this time are injuries — both violent and unintentional — and obesity,” said Dr. Katherine Kaufer Christoffel, a medical and research director at Northwestern University.

“This active transportation stuff really gets at all of those things.”

Dr. Joe Thompson, Director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center to Prevent Childhood Obesity, participated as a briefing panelist but did not attend Congressional meetings. Thompson serves as the Surgeon General of the State of Arkansas, where an alarming 22 percent of children are obese and 40 percent are overweight. Thompson said the built environment is a critical component of America’s livelihood.

“If we don’t solve the upstream causes of health problems, we won’t be able to hold health care reform together,” he said.

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14 year-old health advocate Julia Lopez chats with attendees of the health fly-in after making a few remarks.

Noelle Dobson, Director of the Healthy Eating Active Living initiative at Portland’s Community Health Partnership, has been stressing the link between health and transportation through her work preparing health impact assessments for new development projects.

“This is all public health has ever been about for me,” she said.

T4 America and participating advocates were promoting three important pieces of legislation that address the health and transportation connection.

One is CLEAN-TEA, a Senate bill that would allocate ten percent of revenue from climate legislation toward clean transportation, walking and biking, and other modes that can help reduce emissions. The second is the National Transportation Objectives Act, which would create explicit, specific targets and benchmarks for the transportation bill, including goals like reducing CO2 from transportation by 40%, eliminating at-risk exposure to pollution, and tripling the amount of walking and biking we do.  Lastly is Complete Streets legislation to make our streets safe and  accommodating for all users and people — bus riders, bicyclists and pedestrians.

Most fly-in participants met with their representatives’ transportation staffers, but a few were able to meet face-to-face with the representatives themselves. Heidi Klein, a board member for the Vermont Public Health Association, got a few words in with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, and two fly-in participants from Montana had the chance to meet their junior Senator, Democrat Jon Tester.

Other office visits included Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Sen. Max Baucus of Montana.

Our thanks to the many advocates and supporters who worked very hard to take this crucial message to Capitol Hill.

Participating organizations:

• National Recreation and Park Association
• National Coalition for Promoting Physical Activity
• Campaign to End Obesity
• American Public Health Association
• American Lung Association
• PolicyLink
• National Complete Streets Coalition
• Trust for America’s Health
• America Bikes
• Safe Routes to School
• State and Territorial Injury Prevention Directors Association (STIPDA)

Yesterday we noted transportation’s impact on health care costs, and how expanding access to public transportation and investing more money in complete streets safe for walking and biking can improve overall health and lower healthcare costs.

At the same time, we should remember that having transportation options and the ability to easily get where you need to go have a huge impact on whether or not you receive care. Folks who can’t get to the doctor or who must wait on rides from family and friends are more likely to stay sick.

A study of over 1,059 households in 12 western North Carolina counties tests the relationship between transportation options and healthcare utilization while adjusting for the effects of personal characteristics, health characteristics, and distance. The report found that people with reliable access to healthcare visited their doctor 2.29 times more frequently for serious illness and 1.92 times more frequently for regular checkups than those who did not.

The ability to reliably and affordably make it to doctor’s visits or healthcare appointments is also a matter of transportation equity. Minorities, households in rural areas, the disabled, and low-income Americans face even greater hurdles because many cannot drive and public transportation is often unavailable, inaccessible or unreliable. (Not to mention public transportation, paratransit or dial-a-ride programs being cut left and right)

We already know Americans are tired of being stuck in traffic and are clamoring for more options for getting around. But they are also demanding prevention as a top health care reform priority, and overwhelmingly support increasing funding for prevention programs to reduce disease and keep people healthy.

Meeting the health care needs of all Americans will require funding infrastructure projects that can create more opportunities for physical activity. The healthcare bill Congress is currently working on is just another opportuniy to demand that transportation options and access issues are more broadly included in the debate. It is not just the cost of care, but the ability to access that care that’s proven to reduce hospitalization rates for chronic conditions.

With Congress directing their attention to the contentious debate over health care reform and how to pay for it, it seems that transportation has been relegated to the back burner. In the meantime, evidence is continuing to mount that transportation investments — what we build and where — have an enormous impact on our health and the financial bottom line of providing health care.

Last week the California Center for Public Health Advocacy (CCPHA) released The Economic Costs of Overweight, Obesity and Physical Inactivity Among California Adults. In a state making national headlines for its current budget crisis, the study found that (in 2006) “overweight, obesity and physical inactivity cost the state $41.2 billion – $21.0 billion for overweight and obesity, and $20.2 billion for physical inactivity.”

An even more shocking recent study found that the already-dangerous effects of air pollution are magnified for pregnant women living near busy roads.

According to this study from a team of researchers from the University of California, Irvine, exposure to traffic-generated air pollution during pregnancy increases the risk of preeclampsia and premature birth. The study examined over 80,000 birth records and found that the risk of the life-threatening condition preeclampsia increased 33% and the risk of premature birth rose 128% in women living closest to congested corridors.

Many other negative health effects from vehicle emissions, congestion and air pollution have already been documented — with low-income and minority populations typically experiencing the most harmful side effects due to where interstates and highways get built.

The CCPHA report on obesity included some concrete policy recommendations for improving public health, a few of which are connected to our transportation spending decisions.

• Locate residential, commercial and office buildings close together so more residents can walk and bike to meet their daily needs
• Build neighborhoods with safe and attractive parks and other places for recreational exercise
• Create transportation corridors that support pedestrians and bicyclists

Including some realistic goals for improving public health in the transportation bill — one of T4 America’s six national transportation objectives for the bill — would be a great place to start. If we’re ever going to truly move away from a prescriptive health care model to a preventative model — saving us billions in health care costs — we’re going to have to address more than just the skyrocketing costs of treating illnesses and diseases — we’re going to have to look upstream and address some of the contributing factors.

Doing so could keep us healthier and save us billions.

With research from Becca Homa

• Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood asks for an 18-month extension on the current transportation bill, as Rep. James Oberstar releases an outline of a new one. (Wall Street Journal)

• Streetsblog breaks down Oberstar’s outline.

• A new study shows that sidewalks encourage walking and make us healthier.

• The New York Times reviews a new book on how cyclists are altering the landscape of American cities.

• Southern Florida’s Tri-Rail system faces major cuts and the possibility of being completely shut down by 2011. (Miami Herald)

• A new study from the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Committee on Environmental Health shows sprawling development puts kids’ health at risk. (Virginian Pilot)

Earlier this week, we talked with you about Transportation for America’s national objective for a healthier, safer transportation system, and showed you the performance targets needed to measure our progress towards these goals.

Today, we’d like to talk about just how we hope to reach these goals through some of the policies and reforms that we propose in our Blueprint.

As some of you probably know, trying to understand federal transportation, and the programs, funding mechanisms, and institutional structures behind it, is no day at the beach — these policy details are complex, confusing, and sometimes, pretty boring. In an effort to create a more coherent national vision for our transportation system, T4 America has drafted a simple and clear set of targets and programs in our Blueprint, which we believe can serve as a more accessible guide for the future of transportation policy.

While the programs throughout the entire Blueprint encourage and incentivize investment in safer roads for all users, more walkable, bikeable communities, and cleaner air, we thought we’d focus here on a couple policies and priorities that exemplify our commitment to improving safety and public health.

• Continuing our commitment to reducing deaths and injuries: The last transportation bill, 2005′s SAFETEA-LU, placed a heavy focus on improving safety, and required the creation of detailed plans from state departments of transportation for reducing deaths and injuries. Despite these requirements, we have yet to see clear results and improvements in public safety (Highway deaths have hovered around 42,000 each year this decade, until the plunging economy that resulted in decreased driving lowered them to 37,000 in 2008.) The federal government needs to exert clear leadership in the next transportation bill by holding states and metro areas accountable for showing measurable improvements, and drafting laws at the national level — for example, a freeze on truck size and weights — that will prevent any backsliding on safety issues.

• Encouraging active communities T4 America is supporting direct, targeted investment in our towns and cities to help communities complete walking and bicycling networks, shift a portion of trips to these active modes of transportation, and support a more active, healthy populace. We’re also calling for the creation of complete streets by recommending that all new construction of federally-funded roads included accommodations for all users, including pedestrians, cyclists, and people with disabilities.

• Prioritizing safety where its most needed The Safe Routes to School Program, which provides our kids with active, safe ways to get to and from school through walking and biking, and is an incredibly valuable tool; for that reason, we believe the federal government needs to ramp up its commitment to this program. In order to provide safe options for older drivers and pedestrians, we’re also supporting a strong federal investment in efforts that will make our transportation system safer and more secure for these users.

For those of you who want more details on these issues, check out our Blueprint in full. For the rest of you, be sure to check back next week as we continue to explore the other reforms that Transportation for America is calling for to create 21st Century transportation system!

When we think about our daily commutes to work, walks to the grocery store, or bus rides our kids take to school, there are few things more important than making sure these activities keep us healthy and safe.

After all, the numbers related to these issues are simply staggering — more than 37,000 people killed on our roads in 2008, between $40 and $60 billion in annual health care costs from negative air quality associated with transportation, more than 16 percent of children, and 66 percent of adults, considered overweight or obese due in large part due to a lack of physical activity.

Transportation for America believes that a renewed transportation system must Ensure Safety for All Transportation Users and Improve Public Health Outcomes — a goal that will require some critical changes in the way we approach transportation policy. For that reason, we’ve made it one of six top-line objectives in our Blueprint.

In another post later on this week, we’ll provide you with some of the details for reaching these outcomes; but for now, we wanted to talk about three of our “performance objectives” — measurable outcomes that will come from a new transportation program — that are essential for meeting this goal:

• Triple walking, biking and public transportation usage.
• Improve public safety and lower congestion costs by reducing traffic crashes 50%.
• Achieve zero percent population exposure to at-risk levels of air pollution

Establishing these performance targets in the next transportation bill, and holding states, metro areas, and localities accountable for working towards them, is absolutely critical towards making our roads safer, our air less polluted, and our communities — particularly disadvantages ones — more conducive to healthy activities like walking and biking.

On the surface, it seems slightly obvious to say that if we want to achieve better outcomes, we need to define our goals and make sure that we have a system in place to measure our success. The problem, of course, is that federal policy has never actually established what these goals are.

Dr. Georges Benjamin, the executive director American Public Health Association (a T4 coalition member) said in our recent webinar on safety and public health that the next transportation bill presents a “huge opportunity to benefit the public health” with some major reforms. Unfortunately, he added, there is also an opportunity to do nothing, which will end up harming Americans through more vehicular crashes, less active communities, and worsening air quality.

Let’s make sure the next transportation bill helps make Americans safer and healthier. Check back with us later this week to get a look at some of the specific programs and policies related to public health and safety that Transportation for America is recommending be included in the next transportation bill.