While the overall number of motor vehicle fatalities and serious injuries have generally decreased in recent years, vulnerable road user fatalities and serious injuries continue to rise (National Center for Statistics and Analysis, 2024). Public health professionals, their methods, and their models are essential to incorporate within active transportation best practices because it allows decision makers to capture the ideas, desires, and needs of communities.
A new research brief by UC Berkeley Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC) staff Jarah Crowner and Katherine L. Chen explores how considering the health implications of transportation options is integral to transportation decision-making at each level (state, regional, and local). The research brief also highlights the heavy reliance on quantitative data and argues for the importance of qualitative, anecdotal data alongside it in order to decrease the number of fatalities and serious injury crashes for vulnerable road users across the U.S.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Healthy People 2030 initiative, one’s neighborhood and built environment is one of five social determinants of health. This social determinant can provide insight for transportation planners on which concerns to address when prioritizing traffic safety projects, applying for funding, and/or developing needs assessments. This link between public health and transportation planning is further exemplified by the Safe System Pyramid introduced by Ederer et al. which “combines the transportation paradigm shift of Vision Zero and the Safe System Approach with the two public health models, the Health Impact Pyramid and the Hierarchy of Controls.” Interventions for the safety of our vulnerable road users are “more effective when targeted at the population level because it allows us to address socioeconomic variables, rather than relying on individualistic behavior change to improve traffic safety.”
Healthy People 2030 Social Determinants of Health Graphic (Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services)
The research brief, "Connecting Public Health and Transportation - Applying Crowdsourcing and Community Engagement Principles to Traffic Safety," highlights crowdsourcing as one tool to better connect public health and transportation planning in communities across California. Crowdsourcing tools like Street Story, PhotoVoice, and VideoVoice provide a way to gather information, insight, and knowledge from user-generated data – engaging individuals who may otherwise not participate in the traditional transportation planning process. By learning directly from the community themselves, in their own words, transportation planners can design and build streets that better serve the community and their specific needs.