Case Studies

This section includes a set of case studies demonstrating how communities are working at the intersection of transportation and health.

Health Impact Assessment in San Francisco: A Tool to Build Healthier Communities
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Health Impact Assessment (HIA) is an approach to examining the effects that land use and development decisions have on health in a particular geographic area. The San Francisco Department of Public Health created the Healthy Development Measurement Tool (HDMT)—a guide to conducting HIA in San Francisco. The HDMT provides the health rationales for considering each element, including sustainable transportation, of community conditions and moves through the established standards, key indicators, development targets, and strategic suggestions for policy and design.

Addressing diesel bus pollution and its health consequences in Northern Manhattan, New York: West Harlem Environmental Action, Inc., and the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health
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In 1996, West Harlem Environmental Action (WE ACT), a nonprofit organization that uses community-based action to advance environmental health policy, public health, and quality of life, partnered with the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health (CCCEH) at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, to explore the possibility of excess pollution exposure in Northern Manhattan and to craft appropriate policy responses to their findings. WE ACT and its partners have been widely credited with playing a major role in securing the conversion of existing city buses to clean diesel, among other critical policy wins.

Looking at Transportation Planning Through a Health Lens
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The Coalition for a Livable Future (CLF) wants transportation planners to look beyond traffic volume and bus ridership when laying out new roads and rail lines. This Portland, Oregon-based group says health should be considered, too. Building systems that fosters walking and biking for short trips, and light rail for longer ones, and you’ll do more than reduce the congestion and commute times, the coalition says. People will be healthier, too.

Neighborhood Assessment Teams: Moms Fighting Pollution in Long Beach
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Long Beach Alliance for Children with Asthma’s (LBACA) community health workers (CHW) educate families about asthma and help them improve their indoor air environment, as well as recruit mothers of children with asthma to advocate for better air quality in their neighborhoods. Long Beach and the surrounding communities are affected by the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles and the related goods movement activity. These neighborhoods lie within the wind corridor most affected by harbor, industry, freeway, and refinery pollutants, and the 710 freeway runs through the heart of these communities carrying more than 47,000 truck trips each weekday to and from the third largest port complex in the world.

School Buses are Hazardous to Children’s Health: State Legislation to Limit Idling in Connecticut
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Environment and Human Health Inc. (EHHI), a Connecticut research and policy group, knew the dangers of idling buses in exposing children to diesel pollution. EHHI decided to gather data themselves. The results were alarming. The air monitoring equipment worn by students showed that their exposure to diesel on the bus was 5 to 15 times their normal exposure. EHHI published a report summarizing its findings and took it to state lawmakers. The data, coupled with the diverse coalition, made a compelling case–in 2002 the Connecticut legislature passed a law prohibiting school bus idling for more than three minutes.

Keeping Housing Away from Freeways and Toxic Polluters
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In Otay-Mesa, south of San Diego, developers have proposed 5,500 units of new housing in a largely industrial area near a major freeway. When staff at the San Diego Regional Asthma Coalition learned about the proposal, they began working with partners to stop it. They knew that housing built near polluting businesses and highways could lead to higher rates of asthma and other respiratory diseases for residents—in this case, lower-income Hispanics.