Author: Yizheng Wu

Publisher:

Published: 2018

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9780438628731

This dissertation focuses on the integrated health impact assessment (HIA) of regional sustainable transportation strategies at a fine spatial scale, examining the spatial and demographic variations in public health changes. The sustainable transportation strategies, e.g. promotion of active travel (walking and bicycling), can improve public health through increases in physical activity at the population level. At the same time, changes in active travel impact the risk of traffic injury or increase exposure to air pollution. Therefore, it is critical to assess the comprehensive health impacts of transportation plans. This study enhances the existing HIA tools by providing spatial disaggregated estimates of the public health changes expected to result from plan implementation through three transportation-health exposure pathways: physical activity, traffic injury, and air quality. Integrating with a local activity-based model (ABM), the study applies the individual level trip information to report disaggregated results from physical activity and traffic injury based on a real-world implementation. The implementation is developed for the City of Sacramento, California under its 2016 Metropolitan Transportation Plan/Sustainable Communities Strategy (2016 MTP/SCS). Air quality is quantified by a project- level modeling framework, including the well-calibrated emission model MOVES and air dispersion model AERMOD. Human exposure levels to vehicular pollutants are estimated based on the resulting air pollution concentration and dynamic population activity pattern obtained from local ABM at a highly resolved spatial and temporal scale. This study presents the health equity analysis to report demographically explicit (i.e. race/ethnicity and household income) results from the implementation of 2016 MTP/SCS. This demographical disaggregation is helpful because travel behavior and health outcomes are affected by race/ethnicity and its correlates (e.g. residential location) and planning agencies are required to ensure that their policies and projects are nondiscriminatory. The results demonstrate that the fundamental insights of the application can be applied to different racial and ethnic groups, providing decision makers with the information needed to target interventions to achieve outcomes for disadvantaged populations.