The Health and Transportation Nexus—A Unified Model Integrating Multiple Mechanisms for Collaborative Planning

Transportation is a crucial contributor to health: it not only directly shapes the social and physical environments in myriad ways, but it also determines the types of places where people can live, learn, work, and play in their everyday life.

This presentation will discuss how the social determinants of health framework can be extended to include three major mechanisms through which transportation infrastructure operates on health and equity outcomes. The three mechanisms are behavioral health, environmental health, and social exclusion. The presentation will also explore how understanding the multiple pathway mechanisms between transportation and health can reduce misinformed transportation infrastructure investments that either have limited health benefits or unintended consequences that harm specific population groups.