Healthy Mobility Model for Healthy Communities
Background
Health risk factors are heavily influenced by a community’s built and social environment. Development and application of VHB’s innovative “Healthy Mobility” GIS model correlates land use, urban design, and transportation data in assessing the built environment’s impact on public health. This correlation also allows for a broader ability to factor health into community and transportation planning. While available at a regional or county level, is difficult to find public health data at discrete levels (neighborhood or suburban corridor) without labor intensive surveying and costly health impact assessments. Although there is recognition of the linkage between health and mobility factors, there is little consensus on how to obtain this data with no universal standards defined, and few readily available models to work with.

Purpose
The “Healthy Mobility” Model, using evaluation factors associated with increasing mobility, provides a community health profile for a study area and identifies mobility and urban design enhancements to improve health outcomes. The Model can be added to the standard transportation modeling process, allowing for consideration of a community’s health. Once the baseline community health profile is established, alternative scenarios can be modeled to determine if changes in design or mobility factors influence health outcomes. The Model is designed to promote Healthy Community Design (HCD) and can be utilized by both the public and private sector.

Methods
VHB used applied technology and big data to correlate available demographic, urban design, and transportation data with published health data at the census-tract level. The outcome is a community health profile, which allows for neighborhood or corridor planning at a localized level. The Healthy Mobility Model uses an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis to provide quantitative results about which urban design and mobility factors have the most significant statistical correlation with improved health outcomes. This model can help planners and decision-makers recommend or prioritize physical improvements that will have the greatest contributions to improved community health.

Results
This topic addresses an extremely important and relevant issue—the role that planners play in promoting healthy communities. HCD requires that public health, planning and design, and academia professionals work together to develop tools that can be used to analyze the role that design and transportation plays in promoting better health outcomes. Participants will learn about the relationship between public health and the built environment, including the principles of HCD, health data, innovative tools, successful planning strategies, and best practices for building capacity with decision-makers to routinely include health in the planning process at the local, regional, and state levels. Case studies will be highlighted as examples.

Conclusion
The Healthy Mobility Model will continue to be refined by expanding the data to include additional values and parameters, as well as expand into larger geographic coverage. As development of the Model continues, it will be viable for use in areas without published health data at the census tract level. While the Model is not intended to replace sound professional judgement, it serves as a useful analytical tool to guide and inform decision making.

Presenter: Curtis Ostrodka
Agency Affiliation: VHB

Presenter Biographical Statement: [biography]