Population Health Eye on Utah's Wasatch Front

By Kirstin Q. Siemering, DrPH, RD 

When it comes to transportation policy, Utah’s Wasatch Front region is a frontrunner. The Wasatch Front is an urban area in north-central Utah that consists of a chain of cities and towns stretched along the Wasatch Range. Roughly 80% of Utah's population resides in this narrow region, which contains Salt Lake City, Provo and Ogden. With strong leadership, collaboration, and advocacy, the area has become a model for transportation policy to address rapid population growth and development occurring over the last half century.

So what does this have to do with population health?

Transportation systems are part of the “built environment,” which includes all buildings, spaces and products that are created or modified by people. While the science and practice that link health and the built environment are still relatively new and emerging, there is growing support for creating transportation systems that include routes for pedestrians, bicyclists, and a variety of public transport options. The National Complete Streets Coalition has been a policy and advocacy leader in this effort. The link to healthy behaviors is clear: people need more physical activity, and one way to do this is to create environments that make walking and bicycling easy and safe. But the connection between transportation goes well beyond behavior, to critical social and economic factors that we know drive health.

Last month, the Brookings Institution released a report entitled Missed Opportunity: Transit and Jobs in Metropolitan America. For the report’s release, Brookings’ vice president and founding Director of the Metropolitan Policy Program Bruce Katz argued that "commuting in the U.S. from home to work has become an heroic act as more people are commuting further and further to their jobs...this is becoming a burden many families cannot afford" (please see 2 minute video below for additional remarks). The report profiled the nation’s largest 100 metropolitan areas to see how well public transportation connects people to jobs. Cities on the Wasatch Front were among the most highly rated, securing 3^rd place (Salt Lake City), 9^th place (Ogden), and 11^th place (Provo).

 

Dr. Shaunna Burbidge is a transportation planner in the Salt Lake City area who has been working at the intersection of transportation and public health for nearly a decade. A Utah native, Burbidge did her graduate work at UC Santa Barbara, where she quickly acclimated to southern California active living. She returned to Utah in 2005 with a freshly minted PhD and a mission to build a regional vision for active transportation policy. At that time, the Wasatch Front’s Regional Transportation Plan acknowledged pedestrians and bicyclists in one brief paragraph. In 2006, Burbidge wrote a technical report for the Wasatch Front Regional Council (WFRC, the region’s metropolitan planning organization) on the status of the region’s active modes of transport. The report started a conversation that led to the creation of a broad-based coalition of local planners, elected officials, bicycle, pedestrian, and public health advocacy groups, and university researchers. The recommendations this group created were formally adopted and retained as the first “Public Health Component” of any Regional Transportation Plan in the nation. For her contribution, Burbidge was awarded the Active Living Research: 2009 Translating Research to Policy Award by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

With solid partnerships established, work has moved forward with impressive momentum. In late 2010, the region was awarded two federal grants, including $26 million from the U.S. Department of Transportation (TIGER II) to build a 2-mile streetcar line that will link up to existing lightrail. An additional $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), prepared by Burbidge and her colleagues and partners, will fund development of an affordable housing plan, a study of six transit-oriented development sites, and the creation of sustainability blueprints that can be used locally, regionally and nationally.

The transportation policy accomplishments of Wasatch Front partnerships exemplify the broad and forward thinking that will help continue to expand our dialogue on health beyond healthcare and health behaviors.

Contact Dr. Burbidge at [email protected] or 801-336-7991

Kirstin Q. Siemering, DrPH, RD is a Researcher with the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute.

*****

For further reading:

• APHA has recently released an online toolkit on health, equity, and transportation to help bridge communication between planners and public health professionals.

• Also in the Eye on Population Health Series:

Population Health Eye on Oklahoma

 

Comments

[Liz]

What a great example! Mulit-modal transportation planning too often gets cast as something of interest only to liberals living on the coasts*, so it's great to see red states recognizing the benefits, too.

* E.g., George Will claiming the push for public transportation is about "diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism." (Shortly after this piece came out, Paul Krugman reported spotting Will stepping out of an Amtrak train.)