New subject: [H+T--Friends] Transit makes you short. H+T--Friends Digest, Vol 68, Issue 3

6 Dec 2016

If you read the whole paper, it's a cautionary tale against confusing association with
causation.
When an association intuitively (or because of our prejudices/preconceptions) seems
correct, we ascribe greater emphasis than may be warranted. When we judge it wrong, we
look for other explanations,  such as residual confounding.
Although Bayesian approaches do incorporate our prior (evidence-based) beliefs, this paper
is about less formal approaches to interpreting results.
Regards
Jenny Mindell

Sent from my Sony Xperia™ smartphone

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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: Antwort: 'Transit Makes You Short' (mbrenman001(a)comcast.net)

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Message: 1
Date: Fri, 2 Dec 2016 17:13:09 +0000 (UTC)
From: mbrenman001(a)comcast.net
Subject: Re: [H+T--Friends] Antwort: 'Transit Makes You Short'
To: "Transportation, TRB" &lt;h+t--friends(a)chrispy.net&gt;
Message-ID:
        &lt;802275279.71064468.1480698789280.JavaMail.zimbra(a)comcast.net&gt;
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

And the smaller the passengers, the more people can be crammed into a bus...

----- Original Message -----

From: "Sheryl Gross-Glaser" &lt;grossglaser(a)gmail.com&gt;
To: "TRB Health and Transportation" &lt;h+t--friends(a)chrispy.net&gt;
Sent: Friday, December 2, 2016 7:43:29 AM
Subject: Re: [H+T--Friends] Antwort: 'Transit Makes You Short'

Maybe we can match height of riders with need for petite clothing - a business
opportunity. My petite daughters would appreciate that.

On Thu, Dec 1, 2016 at 10:23 AM, < mbrenman001(a)comcast.net > wrote:

What is "the power of large sample"? And of course correlation is not causality.
One can imagine that in the us, transit riders are shorter than car driver s, because of
ethnic difference s in users. And there have been various studies showing a correlation
between height and higher pay, partly due to gender disparities.
Marc brenman

Sent from XFINITY Connect Mobile App

-----Original Message-----

From: thomas.goetschi(a)uzh.ch
To: h+t--friends(a)chrispy.net
Cc:
Sent: 2016-12-01 6:48:32 AM
Subject: [H+T--Friends] Antwort: 'Transit Makes You Short'

this may have some value for a journal club - I see flaws at various levels. How it may
contribute to our understanding of any possible relationship between public transport and
health escapes me.

Thomas G?tschi, PhD

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(eh. Institut f?r Sozial- und Pr?ventivmedizin)
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Tel: +41 44 634 50 68
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_____________________________________________________________

Ann Hartell ---12/01/2016 12:14:34 PM---I'm not sure how many on this list follow
David Levinson's blog The Transportist (over here: https:

Von: Ann Hartell < ahartell(a)gmail.com >
An: TRB Health and Transportation < h+t--friends(a)chrispy.net >
Datum: 12/01/2016 12:14 PM
Betreff: [H+T--Friends] 'Transit Makes You Short'
Gesendet von: h+t--friends-bounces(a)chrispy.net

I'm not sure how many on this list follow David Levinson's blog The Transportist
(over here: https://transportist.org/ ), but he recently published a post about a working
paper he co-authored with Alireza Emragun titled "Transit Makes you Short": On
Health Impact Assessment of Transportation and the Built Environment.

The blog post is here:
https://transportist.org/2016/11/28/u-study-says-transit-does-not-have-impa…

The full paper is here:
http://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/179812

Abstract:
The current research provides a test framework to understand whether and to what extent
increasing public transit use and accessibility by transit affect health. To this end, the
effect of transit mode share and accessibility by transit on general health, body mass
index, and height are investigated, while controlling for socioeconomic, demographic, and
physical activity factors. The coefficient-p-value-sample-size chart is created and effect
size analysis are conducted to explore whether the transit use is practically significant.
Building on the results of the analysis, we found that the transit mode share and
accessibility by transit are not practically significant, and the power of large-sample
misrepresents the effect of transit on public health. The results, also, highlight the
importance of data and variable selection by portraying a significant correlation between
transit use and height in a multivariate regression analysis. What becomes clear from this
study is that!
  in spite of the mushrooming interdisciplinary studies in the nexus of transportation and
health arena, researchers often propose short- and long-term policies blindly, while
failing to report the inherent explanatory power of variables. We show that there is a
thin line between false positive and true negative results. From the weakness of p-values
perspective, further, we strove to alert both researchers and practitioners to the
dangerous pitfall deriving from the power of large- samples. Building the results on just
significance and sign of the parameter of interest is worthless, unless the magnitude of
effect size is carefully quantified post analysis.

~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ann Hartell
Doctoral Candidate
Institute for Multi-Level Governance and Development
Wirtschaftsuniversit?t Wien/Vienna University of Economics and Business
https://www.wu.ac.at/en/mlgd/

Personal: annhartell.com
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Re: [H+T--Friends] Transit makes you short. H+T--Friends Digest, Vol 68, Issue 3