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How metro planning agencies are promoting physical activity and health

Join us for the release of a new paper showing how regional transportation planning agencies are promoting physical activity and health while improving mobility and access to opportunity.

Register for the launch of Measuring what we value: Policies to prioritize public health and build prosperous regions on February 21st at 12:00 p.m EDT.

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How we get around each day shapes our quality of life, especially our health. People who walk or bicycle more for transportation are shown to have lower rates of heart disease, diabetes and other conditions that can complicate or shorten lives. And the demand for more opportunities to safely walk and bicycle is at an all-time high in cities and towns of all sizes across the country.

And communities are responding by planning, funding, and fast-tracking projects to make bicycling, walking, and riding transit safer, more convenient, and more realistic as travel options.

But getting these projects planned, designed and built can be a challenge. How can regions bring more of these projects to fruition? How can they integrate them into the processes of choosing what to build? How can they upend perhaps decades of radically different priorities to make these types of projects the norm?

This new paper, produced by T4America and the American Public Health Association, outlines four policy levers MPOs have at their disposal to help increase and improve active transportation projects to meet the demand, decrease health disparities, increase access to opportunities, and strengthen local economies — with specific short real-life stories to go with each. On this launch webinar, we’ll be joined by staff from a number of metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) to hear how they’re successfully prioritizing bicycling and walking projects. We’ll explore the specific policies these MPOs have adopted, and how they’ve implemented them.

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Register today and we’ll also send you a short four-page preview of the full paper to be released on February 21st, a doc summarizing the specific strategies that MPOs are using to make more of these projects a reality.

Already joining us on February 21? Spread the word!

(Note: We profiled four of these MPOs at length in this package of related short case studies, released late in 2016.)

Join us for the release of Planning for a Healthier Future

2016_0504 Kresge Calthrope PM ReportThanks to 2012’s MAP-21 legislation, all metro areas and states will soon be using a limited array of performance measures. While the in-progress federal requirements will cover a limited range of measures, T4America is releasing a new resource next week to help metro areas find ways to use performance measures to improve public health, address social equity concerns, and advance environmental quality.

Join us next week on Wednesday, June 22 at 4:00 p.m. EDT for a special online discussion about the new report, including firsthand experience from some of the metro regions that participated in a related two-year collaborative — more about that below. Sign up and be the first to get a copy of the Planning for a Healthier Future report in your inbox next Wednesday.

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While the federal performance measures currently being developed will cover limited metrics like safety, condition of roads and bridges, or how to measure congestion, this report lays out additional measures that enable MPOs and regions to understand the health impacts of transportation and land use decisions within three other dimensions: physical activity, traffic safety, and exposure to air pollution.

This report is the result of our two-year Planning for a Healthier Future collaborative with teams from the regions of Seattle, WA, Portland, OR, San Diego, CA and Nashville, TN. These four regions are actively working to improve health, increase access to opportunity for vulnerable populations, protect the environment and promote economic competitiveness by developing and implementing transportation performance measures for their respective metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs)

Performance measures and health?

urban design for health transportation impacts health

Cities and regions around the country face important choices about how and where they want to grow, how to connect people to economic prosperity and how to use limited resources to promote healthy communities and provide a great quality of life for all of their residents.

Performance-based planning allows stakeholders and decision-makers to understand how a given investment, policy, or decision “performs” across certain measures over time — providing more clarity and transparency on exactly what state or regional transportation dollars are accomplishing. As a result of the transportation projects that get built, is the air cleaner? Do more people have access to opportunity? Is environmental quality made better or worse? Are the impacts on people’s health — especially vulnerable populations — positive or negative?

This detailed report summarizes current best practices in the development of health, equity and environmental measures that can be used to evaluate the performance of transportation investments at a regional scale. It aims to explore and test a variety of different data-driven measures that can evaluate packages of transportation investments — such as those frequently bundled together by MPOs in transportation plans.

Join us next week to learn more and get your copy!

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