If Health Matters

Conventional public decision-making is reductionist: individual problems are assigned to specialized professions and organizations with narrowly defined responsibilities (Litman 1999). For example, transportation agencies are responsible for improving traffic flow, environmental agencies are responsible for reducing pollution, and health agencies are responsible for public health. This can result in an agency implementing solutions to one problem (those within their mandate) that exacerbate other problems (those outside their mandate), and it undervalues solutions that provide modest but multiple benefits.

This report examines a particular example of this sort of policy disconnect: the lack of coordination between transport and health objectives. It asks, “How would transport policy and planning practices change if transportation agencies considered public health one of their primary responsibilities?”  Many transportation professionals may be offended by this question because they do consider public health an important concern as reflected in their efforts to reduce traffic crashes and pollution emissions. However, as this report points out, current transport planning practices tend to focus on some health impacts but overlook others. For transportation agencies to better address public health objectives they will need to consider a wider range of health impacts and develop better tools for evaluating how particular policy and planning decisions affect public health objectives.