Whatever age we are and whatever activities we undertake, transport and mobility play a fundamental role in our daily lives and routines. In the Netherlands, 70% of the trips made are shorter than 7.5 km. In the past decades, planning and transport policies have been predominantly focusing on the car. As a result, urban living drastically changed, levels of congestion and pollution increased, and cycling and walking as means of transport decreased. By the year 2015, cities are facing new challenges. Achieving lively, safe, sustainable and healthy cities has become a general rule and urgent desire and recently 'Healthy urban living' is getting more and more attention. The current dominance of an inactive, car-oriented lifestyle directly threatens public health. Stimulating active transport use not only influences the level of physical activity, but also has beneficial health effects due to reduced air pollution emissions, greenhouse emissions and noise levels. The effect on road safety is controversial: some claim an improvement, while others found that this effect depends on age and gender. Since active transport affects health through these different pathways it would be of value to combine the outcomes with respect to this different aspect into one overall health outcome that summarizes the aggregate impact on health by using a Health Impact Assessment (HIA). Main drawbacks of these HIAs are that, apart from the fact that these are theoretical exercises, much of the information needed for the assessment is unavailable or unknown, resulting in a relatively large number of assumptions. Therefore, more in-depth knowledge is needed in order to decide if the assumptions made in HIAs are a correct representation of reality and thus if the presented health effects are a reliable prediction of the outcome of this intervention in practice. To have correct information at ones disposal will result in HIA outcomes correctly representing current practice and in policy documents deciding where to put the money in order to most efficiently promote public health. The aim of this PhD thesis was twofold: 1. to investigate the feasibility of policy measures and/or interventions aiming to induce a mode shift for car use to active transport; and 2. to provide in-depth information on the personal and environmental characteristics of short car and active transport (walking & cycling) trips associated with transport choice. (Author/publisher)
Abstract