Assessing Impacts of Time Use on Children's Physical Fitness in Relation to Risk for Obesity and Diabetes

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Summary: Researchers from the transportation, planning and health fields share the common goal of promoting physically active lifestyle. One challenge that researchers often face is the measurement of physical activity, particularly among children. This is because the sporadic nature of children’s physical activity patterns makes it difficult to recall and quantify such activities. Additionally, children’s lower cognitive functioning compared to adults prevents them from accurately recalling their activities. This presentation will describe the design and application of a novel self-report instrument - the Graphs for Recalling Activity Time (GReAT) - for measuring children’s activity time use patterns. The instrument was applied in a study of children’s risk for obesity and diabetes in a predominately Hispanic community in Milwaukee, WI. Time-use data for two weekdays and one weekend day were collected for various physical and sedentary activities. The data was then assessed against measurements of the children’s cardiovascular fitness, weight status and insulin resistance through exploratory analysis and structured equation modeling. Findings on GReAT’s reliability and new evidence on the impacts of time-use in different activities on children’s risk for...

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Busy Streets Are Bad For Cyclists' Lungs, Portland Study Says

Regional Planning, Greenhouse Gases, and UrbanFootprint open source software

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Summary: Since about 2008, the planning world has been experiencing a paradigm shift that began in places like California and Oregon that have adopted legislation requiring the linking of land use and transportation plans to outcomes, specifically to the reduction of greenhouse gases (GHGs). In response to this need, Calthorpe Associates has developed a new planning tool, called UrbanFootprint, on a fully Open Source platform (i.e. Ubuntu Linux, PostGIS, PostGreSQL, etc.). As a powerful and dynamic web and mobile-enabled geo-spatial scenario creation and modeling tool with full co-benefits analysis capacity, UrbanFootprint has great utility for urban planning and research at multiple scales, from general plans, to project assessments, to regional and state-wide scenario development and analysis. Scenario outcomes measurement modules include: a powerful ‘sketch’ transportation model that produces travel and emissions impacts; a public health analysis engine that measures land use impacts on respiratory disease, obesity, and related impacts and costs; climate-sensitive building energy and water modeling; fiscal impacts analysis; and greenhouse gas and other emissions modeling.

Bio: Garlynn Woodsong is a Project Manager in the regional and large-...

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Measuring Urban Bicyclists' Uptake of Traffic-Related Pollution

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Summary: Urban bicyclists’ uptake of traffic-related air pollution is still not well quantified, due to a lack of direct measurements of uptake and a lack of analysis of the variation in uptake. This paper describes and establishes the feasibility of a novel method for measuring bicyclists’ uptake of volatile organic compounds (VOC) by sampling breath concentrations. Early results from the data set demonstrate the ability of the proposed method to generate findings for transportation analysis, with statistically significant exposure and uptake differences from bicycling on arterial versus bikeway facilities for several traffic-related VOC. These results provide the first empirical evidence that the usage of bikeways (or greenways) by bicyclists within an urban environment can significantly reduce uptake of dangerous traffic-related gas pollutants. Dynamic concentration and respiration data reveal unfavorable correlations from a health impacts perspective, where bicyclists’ respiration and travel time are greater at higher-concentration locations on already high-concentration roadways (arterials).

Bio: Alex Bigazzi is a Ph.D. candidate in Transportation Engineering at PSU, where he is also teaching a class on transportation emissions modeling....

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Congestion modeling and mitigation in the National Airspace System

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Summary: Dr. Lovell will talk about three projects funded by NASA and the FAA, addressing congestion in the National Airspace System. Dr. Lovell's team developed diffusion-based queuing models of individual airports that could support better building blocks for network-wide congestion models. The advantage of the new models is their flexibility with respect to input distributions. In a study for the FAA, Dr. Lovell's team developed day-of-operations collaboration "languages" suitable for the FAA and individual carriers in order to collectively manage expected airspace disruptions. Finally, he will discuss a study on predictability in the airspace, with a focus on scheduled block times.

Dr. Lovell is an Associate Professor with joint appointments in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Institute for Systems Research. He is a member of the faculty of the Applied Mathematics, Statistics, and Scientific Computation Program. He is director of the University of Maryland chapter of Engineers Without Borders - USA, and serves that organization on its board and as a leader of one of its Technical Advisory Councils. Dr. Lovell received his B.A. in Mathematics from Portland State University in 1990, and M.S. and Ph.D....

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Healthy Food Accessibility and Food Deserts in Seattle, WA

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Junfeng Jiao, Assistant Professor in Urban Planning at Ball State University, will discuss his research on healthy food accessibility. His research introduced a new way to measure healthy food access and to identify food deserts, and was recently published by the American Journal of Public Health in 2012.

Making Healthy Places: Designing and Building for Health, Well-being, and Sustainability

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Andrew Dannenberg, MD, MPH, is an Affiliate Professor in environmental health and in urban design and planning at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he teaches interdisciplinary courses on health impact assessment and on healthy community design.  He is also a consultant to and former Team Lead of the Healthy Community Design Initiative at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, where he works on activities related to examining the health aspects of community design with a special focus on the use of health impact assessment. Previously he served as Director of CDC’s Division of Applied Public Health Training, as Preventive Medicine Residency director and as an injury prevention epidemiologist on the faculty at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, and as a cardiovascular epidemiologist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda.  Dr. Dannenberg received an MD from Stanford University and an MPH from Johns Hopkins University, and completed a family medicine residency at the Medical University of South Carolina.  With Drs. Howard Frumkin and Richard Jackson, he recently published a book on healthy community design entitled Making Healthy Places: Designing and Building for Health, Well-being, and Sustainability (Island Press, 2011, www.makinghealthyplaces.com).

Demonstrating the Benefits of Sustainable Streets for Active Aging

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This project will help demonstrate how sustainable ("green") streets contribute to the well-being of a community, including the physical and mental health of older and younger adults, along with the environment and economy. The project will collect data in Portland, OR neighborhoods to answer the following research questions:

Are residents living near sustainable streets more physically active in their neighborhood?

Do residents living near sustainable streets interact with neighbors more and demonstrate higher levels of neighborhood social capital?

What are residents’ opinions of sustainable streets?

Are there variations in responses to sustainable streets by age or other demographics? In particular, how to older adults differ from younger adults?

Does the implementation process and design affect green street outcomes?

Do sustainable streets affect home values?

How do green streets affect stormwater flows, urban heat island, and carbon sequestration in Portland neighborhoods?

The project includes a survey of residents in two neighborhoods with green street features and two control neighborhoods; an environmental assessment of the green street treatments; and an analysis of housing values using a hedonic modeling approach.

The project will be guided by an Advisory council of members of various stakeholder organizations...

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Applying Health Impact Assessment to Bicycle and Pedestrian Planning

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Abstract: As part of Clark County Public Health’s Planning Active Walkable Neighborhoods project, a Health Impact Assessment (HIA) was conducted on the county’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan.  A rapid HIA was completed to provide input on the draft plan, and a subsequent comprehensive HIA was designed to evaluate the impacts of final proposals. This presentation will provide an overview of the process and results of the HIA, examine lessons learned, and discuss transferability to other jurisdictions or projects.

Health Benefits of Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions in our Transportation System

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The video begins at 5:58.

Abstract: An overview will be presented on key policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in our transportation system, and the health outcomes tied with those policies. The results come from the first-ever, formal Health Impact Assessment done on a climate change policy, coordinated by Upstream Public Health, and conducted by Oregon Health Science University and Human Impact Partners. Key health impacts related to changes in air pollution, physical activity and collisions will be presented for each of the 11 policies related to reduced driving. A new, ground-breaking study will also be presented on scenario planning that was conducted in London and New Delhi, that could be a model for how scenario planning can be conducted in Oregon.

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