2459 - Active Transport and Health: Is Employment Essential to Community Change in Developing Countries?

Publication date: June 2018Source: Journal of Transport & Health, Volume 9, SupplementAuthor(s): Lake SagarisThe links between health and physical activity and between physical activity and habitual travel by passive (cars) and active (principally walking and cycling) transport modes have been well explored. As a result, the potential of urban planning strategies that mobilize their potential for achieving significant health and environmental benefits is well established.In developing countries, however, travel patterns are already far more centred on walking, cycling and increasingly, motor cycles. In many cities, this has occurred despite car-centred urban planning, which has boosted road-related deaths and caused air pollution and other related phenomena to soar. In these very different contexts, will strategies tested in developed countries really serve us well, or should we consider employment generation as integral to behavioural change for low- and middle-income communities?Santiago Chile has transitioned rapidly to a car-centred urban transport model, with massive subsidies for highways and other infrastructure that has encouraged sprawling land use policies and high levels of car use. Cars, however, remain the privilege of just 40% of households, given the severe concentration of wealth in this recently democratizing, post-dictatorial society. Health and environmental impacts have been very negative. So too, the effect on social equality, in a city that is already ex...
Source: Journal of Transport and Health - Category: Occupational Health Source Type: research