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

About the Webinar

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 discussed 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 also explored 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.

The webinar was held in conjunction with a CTS Transportation Planning and the Economy Research Council meeting.

Webinar Materials

• Watch the recording
• Fan's presentation slides (PDF)
• Tupper's presentation slides (PDF)

Speakers

Yingling Fan is a professor in the regional planning and policy area at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs. She works interdisciplinarily in the fields of land use, transportation, social equity, and public health. Fan's recent work has focused on employment accessibility and social mobility, regional economic competitiveness, transit development, and access to green space and opportunities for healthy physical activity, all informed by a strong social equity perspective. She has a PhD in city planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Nissa Tupper is a transportation and public health planner at the Minnesota Department of Transportation. She works with partners to embed public health and equity practices into agency decision-making. Her current efforts include guiding a project equity health assessment, advancing complete streets for the agency, and identifying public health measures. Her approach is informed by a diverse professional background in communications, landscape architecture, and public health.