While the percent of bike commuters is relatively small, bicycling for other types of trips – school, shopping, social, medical etc.. are important to consider. Together, biking and walking trips exceed transit trips in many places. Accommodating biking and walking trips doesn’t have operating cost like transit – much lower per trip cost for biking and walking. Features like showers, lockers, repair facilities, etc can often be combined in ‘bike centers’ to make the most of these investments.
-Paula Reeves
From: h+t--friends-bounces@chrispy.net [mailto:h+t--friends-bounces@chrispy.net] On Behalf Of mbrenman001@comcast.net
Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2012 3:04 PM
To: TRB Health and Transportation
Cc: David Ragland
Subject: Re: [H+T--Friends] active transportation access to healthcare facilities
At the moment, the percent of bike riders to work is tiny. Perhaps it should be increased. But should "changing room, showers" be provided to only one type of commuter? If they are, they should be carefully costed out, and a conscious decision made to provide such incentives for bike riders. Or not.
Marc Brenman
From: "Phyllis Orrick" <phylliso@berkeley.edu>
To: "erik weber" <erik.weber@dot.gov>
Cc: h+t--friends@chrispy.net, "David Ragland" <davidr@berkeley.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2012 10:35:31 AM
Subject: [H+T--Friends] active transportation access to health care facilities
Eric,
Your comments (pasted in below) to the TRB health and transportation subcommittee are really interesting and useful.
David Ragland, here at SafeTREC, has done some preliminary work on non-emergency health transportation systems, which he presented at a separate workshop around the time of TRB. (He is cc'ed and might have something to add, as I am not familiar with the specifics of his findings.)
In terms of health care facilities' "friendliness" to active transportation access, as someone who thinks about bicycle-oriented design and has done 2 papers for TRB on the subject in the last two years, I am struck by the lack of access--and not just for patients and visitors, but for employees. Even our Oakland Kaiser campus, which has a longstanding shuttle service connecting its buildings to BART, falls pretty short in this area. There is bike parking in the garage, but it's for employees only and in a dark and sort of scary place, with no signage or wayfinding. The patient parking area, when I finally found it, is pretty enough, but very small. And this from a company whose leadership enthusiastically embraces the 10,000 steps program.
Part of the difficulty is that building owners and operators don't have a "cookbook" for these designs and, unless they are bicycle riders themselves, have problems understanding some of the unique needs and opportunities. (Imagine a changing room, showers and safe and secure bike parking for staff to avail themselves of lunchbreak bike rides.)
I'm attaching a paper I did with Karen Frick of the University of California Transportation Center on 4 Berkeley building owners and their decisions to invest in this "infrastructure that extends beyond the door." A policy brief is also attached for quicker reading.
As part of my work developing the CATSIP website on active transportation safety in California, I also am in contact with bike and ped planners across the state. Some notable activity is taking place in SF and Silicon Valley, the latter, I am hearing anecdotally, a hotbed of innovative ways to incorporate bicycle riding and walking into their campuses (Google, Facebook and Apple, to name a few). I can't help but think it would be of value to collect their design solutions, along with costs, challenges and opportunities, into a central toolkit.
Anyway, sorry for the long comments, but it seems like a potentially small shift in design thinking that could alter the fabric of the built environment to raise awareness of and participation in active transportation modes (though we would have to evaluate the response to be certain).
Best,
Phyllis
--
Communications Director
Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC)
University of California Transportation Center (UCTC)
Institute for Urban and Regional Development (IURD)
California Active Transportation Safety Information Pages (CATSIP)
2614 Dwight Way
UC Berkeley
Berkeley CA 94720-7374
510-643-1779
@transsafe
@californiaUTC
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
From: <erik.weber@dot.gov>
Subject: Re: [H+T--Friends] Help inform our Subcommittee's TRB 2013
Workshop Proposal!
In preparing a DOT presentation on Transportation and Health at a panel about social determinants of health and health disparities at NIH for Nation Minority Health Month, I sketched an outline that I think could be informative to planning next year:
Transportation's impact on health
* Transportation availability & access to care
* Transportation options & livable communities
* Transportation planning & environmental justice
As I mentioned back at the annual meeting, there is nowhere near enough research being done on bullet #1, while nos 2&3 get covered by a lot of disciplines. This subcommittee can help fill that gap. There is a need to look not only at "transportation decisions" which imply planning of projects & future impacts, but transportation use and availability and their impact on individual health outcomes. Arguably, transportation has a much larger impact on health when considered in the immediate term and on an individual scale.
To use two specific examples: certainly planning decisions can have large future aggregate impacts on air quality and respiratory health as a result - but how many people in the past year have ended up in emergency care, or, sadly, died because they were unable to get to a preventive appointment like dialysis or other chronic disease treatment? That's a much more immediate and measurable impact, yet no one can really say for sure. That's where, in my opinion, this committee has the biggest opportunity to contribute.
I think TCRP made a good foray into this area with B-27 "Cost Benefit Analysis of Providing Non-Emergency Medical Transportation,"<http://www.trb.org/Main/Public/Blurbs/156625.aspx> but this was really only a beginning, and happened 7 years ago now.
I would argue that the Public Health sector is pretty strongly engaged in the transportation discussion and it's time now to engage more people in the Health Care & Services sectors. In the long term, I think, that engagement will have benefits for all of the other questions the subcommittee considers. As hospitals, insurance companies, and other care providers better understand the direct impact of transportation on their missions and their bottom lines, the more they will support transportation options and better transportation planning. I mean how many hospitals are built today to enable, much less encourage, walking to and from? I sure haven't seen one recently. To what extent to providers consider transportation access (beyond driving & parking garages) when placing and planning new facilities? These are all very important issues which are not being researched.
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