Why Transportation Planning is Important to Public Health 

Could our transportation choices be affecting our health? Public health practitioners think so and here's why: decreased physical activity levels and rising obesity rates, both of which keep heart disease the number one cause of death across the nation. 

NC has become a state of seriously overweight, physically inactive individuals with more options for cars than for people. We rank 43rd in the nation for physical activity levels (that means only 7 states are worse than we are!) and 39th for overweight and obese adults. Over 59% of NC adults are overweight or obese. That translates into alarming health care costs for our employers and employees. In the US, direct and indirect health care costs associated with physical inactivity and obesity total up to $150 billion annually. The reason? One of many reasons is that we have fewer and fewer opportunities to be active. 

Transportation planning and how that planning is implemented can have a tremendous impact on our opportunities to be physically active and our rising obesity rates. When communities are designed and planned in such a way as to perpetuate travel by automobile and discourage travel by foot or bike, we essentially engineer physical activity out of our daily routines. No longer is it possible for someone to walk or bike to work, the corner store, or with their child to school. We must drive. Whether our destinations are right across the street or ½ mile away, we're using the car and not our feet or bicycles to get there. 

The current allocation of resources within the NC transportation system does not serve to increase our options to be physically active; it encourages most people to use their vehicle rather than other, more physically active modes. If we could find a way to allocate more transportation dollars to modes of travel other than the automobile, particularly public transit, bicycle and pedestrian facilities, then we could begin to build physical activity back into our daily lives, which in turn would assist in lowering our obesity rates and ultimately prevent heart disease. 

For more information on heart disease and stroke, as well as vital heart-health statistics for NC, check out www.startwithyourheart.com