Transportation
kkrisberg | November 4, 2013It takes time to change social norms, so it'll probably take many, many years until it's as socially unacceptable to text or use a cell phone while driving as it is to start the engine without first buckling a seat belt. In the meantime, researchers say, smart policies are needed to address the increasing share of pedestrian and bicyclist deaths attributed to distracted driving.
According to a new study published in Public Health Reports, the rate of distracted driving-related fatalities per 10 billion vehicle miles traveled went up from 116.1 in 2005 to 168.6 in 2010 for pedestrians and from…
kkrisberg | August 30, 2013For older workers, the most dangerous occupational move may be getting behind the wheel.
Last Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released data showing that among highway transportation incidents, which are the leading cause of occupational death in the country, the highest fatality rates occur among workers ages 65 years old and older. In fact, workers in that age group experienced a fatality rate three times higher than workers ages 18 to 54. The unfortunate trend was seen across industries and occupations and among most demographic groups, according to data published in…
lborkowski | June 21, 2013by Kim Krisberg
When most of us pass by a new high-rise or drive down a new road, we rarely think: Did the builders and planners consider my health? However, a new report from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency offers evidence that certain types of land use and transportation decisions can indeed limit the human health and environmental impacts of development.
Released in mid-June, the publication is a revised and updated version of an EPA report initially published in 2001. Agency officials said the report was particularly timely as the nation's built environments are quickly changing…
cmonforton | June 17, 2013Uro Ama Orji, 54, a livery driver in Brooklyn, NY planned to spend Fathers' Day, with his five children. The family didn't get the chance. Three days earlier, Mr. Orji was fatally stabbed in the eye with an umbrella by a passenger. He is the 17th cab driver this year killed on-the-job in the U.S. A security camera at a nearby delicatessen captured some of the horrific attack. Would a video camera inside his vehicle have deterred the criminal from assaulting him?
An analysis by researchers with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) suggest the answer is "yes…
lborkowski | May 17, 2013It's Bike to Work Day! Here in DC 14,000 people signed up to participate, and volunteers staffed 72 pit stops to offer refreshments and prizes to cyclists. Between 2006 and 2011, the number of DC residents who commute by bike jumped from 5,667 to 9,669 (accounting for 2% of commuters in 2006 and 3.15% in 2011). Figures from other cities are available on this map from GOVERNING.
It's not surprising that more DC commuters are biking, because over the past few years the city has made substantial investments in bicycling infrastructure. Our Capital Bikeshare system keeps expanding, and our…
cmonforton | May 8, 2013The rate of work-related fatal injuries in some States is more than three times the national rate of 3.5 deaths per 100,000 workers. That's just one disturbing fact contained in the AFL-CIO's annual Death on the Job report which was released this week. In Wyoming, for example, the rate of fatal work-related injuries is 11.6 per 100,000, based on 32 deaths in the State in 2011 (the year for which the most recent data is available.) North Dakota's and Montana's rate is 11.2, based on 44 and 49 deaths, respectively. The rate in Alaska is 11.1, based on 39 deaths. In total, 4,693 workers…
lborkowski | March 15, 2013If you've followed the link from the New York Times Magazine's letters page, welcome to The Pump Handle! We're a public health blog covering issues from healthcare to worker health and safety to water and sanitation; see our About page for the story behind our name. The full version of my post about Amtrak is here.
What I said in that post was that it makes sense to invest in intercity rail because intercity car and air travel might become prohibitively expensive and/or time-consuming in the future -- whether due to a carbon tax, oil supply issues, traffic and air travel hassles, or something…
lborkowski | March 4, 2013While the latest New York Times Magazine paints a portrait of the relatively small slice of the US population that takes long-distance train rides, a recent Brookings Institution report notes that millions of shorter-distance riders have made Amtrak the fastest-growing mode of travel in the US. In A New Alignment: Strengthening America's Commitment to Passenger Rail, Robert Puentes, Adie Tomer, and Joseph Kane report that Amtrak ridership has grown 55% since 1997 (compared to a 20% increase in air travel), and now carries more than 31 million riders annually.
This renaissance of rail doesn't…
cmonforton | December 10, 2012[Updated 1/5/2013]
[Updated 8/25/2013]
The world's largest labor organization for airline flight attendants--- the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA) ---says it took four decades of work, but now its members working in airplane cabins will finally have rights and protections provided by federal OSHA. In an on-line letter to members, the AFA-CWA calls the victory: "OSHA extended to our cabins."
For decades AFA has pursued legal and regulatory solutions to extend OSHA safety and health protections to workers in the airline industry. The roadblocks have been enormous, but our union…
lborkowski | September 19, 2012The New York Times has a terrific graphic that plots the number of auto fatalities per 100,000 people and the vehicle miles driven per capita from 1950 to 2011. Overall, we're driving far more vehicle-miles per capita and seeing far fewer auto deaths than we were six decades ago, but this hasn't happened in a linear fashion. Rather, as Hannah Fairfield explains, change occurs unevenly:
Plotting the two most important variables against each other — miles traveled versus deaths per 100,000 population — yields a pattern that looks like a plateau followed by a steep drop. It evokes the theory of…
cmonforton | June 11, 2012Tobacco companies did it. Asbestos-peddlers did it. Chromium users did it. The list goes on and on. When polluters and manufacturers of dangerous products feel threatened by scientific evidence that their pet compound is carcinogenic to humans, they will do everything money can by to avoid the "cancer-causing" label.
The latest example comes from diesel-engine manufacturers. Their efforts come just in time for a meeting of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) scheduled for June 5-12, 2012. IARC, an agency within the World Health Organization, is convening an expert…
lborkowski | June 7, 2012Via Ezra Klein, here's a striking infographic from the Bipartisan Policy Center comparing what makes us healthy to how we as a nation spend our health dollars:
Infographic from the Bipartisan Policy Center
As it illustrates, behaviors are major contributors to our health status, but a tiny fraction of US health spending goes to encouraging healthy behaviors like physical activity.
The Bipartisan Policy Center report Lots to Lose: How America's Health and Obesity Crisis Threatens our Economic Future offers several recommendations for improving nutrition and physical activity in the US. In…
lborkowski | April 10, 2012Slate has just started a new series by Tom Vanderbilt called "The Crisis in American Walking: How we got off the pedestrian path." Vanderbilt observes that it's odd to see things like "Campaign to Get America Walking" when ambulation is one of the most natural activities for our species. Reliance on cars seems to be the main culprit in the United States' sad distinction as being the industrialized country where people walk the least. And that's a shame, Vanderbilt explains, because walking has many health benefits:
Here are just some of the benefits, physical, cognitive and otherwise, that it…
lborkowski | March 15, 2012Yesterday, the Senate passed a two-year transportation bill by a vote of 74 to 22, putting us close to getting a reasonably good piece of legislation signed by March 31, when the current stopgap extension will expire. Last month, the House Natural Resources Committee approved a terrible bill that would have eliminated the current dedicated funding for public transportation, but House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has so far not brought it to the floor for a vote. The American Public Health Association and 15 other public-health groups wrote to Representatives urging a "no" vote on the House…
lborkowski | February 10, 2012The House of Representatives Natural Resources Committee has approved what Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood calls "the worst transportation bill I've ever seen during 35 years of public service." LaHood spent 14 years in Congress, serving as a Republican representative from Illinois, and told Politico that Congress always came together in the past to support transportation, but HR 7 is the most partisan transportation bill he's ever seen.
For the past 30 years, federal transportation legislation has allocated a small portion of the national gas tax to transit funding. Under the new five-…
lborkowski | November 28, 2011The UN climate talks going on in Durban aren't likely to lead to any major breakthroughs, but it would be nice if the US could at least avoid backsliding on the better-than-nothing steps it's taken on emissions. One important step for controlling emissions is ensuring the availability of affordable public transportation. Congress has helped make public transit more affordable for workers for the past three years by temporarily raising the limit on the monthly amount of pretax salary that can be set aside for transit. The problem is that limit, currently set at $230 per month, is set to drop…
lborkowski | November 3, 2011Bicycling has been in the news a lot this week. E&E News reports that China is trying to get people back onto bicycles in an attempt to address traffic problems. The city of Zhongshan has launched a bike-sharing system with 4,000 bikes; Hangzhou and Shanghai have systems with 50,000 and 19,000 bikes, respectively. Reporter Coco Liu contrasts these figures to the US's largest bike-sharing program: DC's, with 1,100 bikes. (Read my earlier post on Capital Bikeshare here.) Even with such relatively large systems, though, demand can quickly outstrip supply, as when a train full of homeward-…
lborkowski | November 2, 2011Something that's come up in a couple of the different sessions I've attended at the American Public Health Association annual meeting is the problem of inadequate definitions of success. It's important to set targets and measure progress against them - and missing targets can be a signal that it's time to revise the strategy. But if the targets are set without sufficient thought, a person or group can think they're succeeding when they're not really doing such a great job.
One example of this came up in the session "Getting from here to there: Promoting health and environmental justice…
lborkowski | October 18, 2011by Kim Krisberg
Mark Martin isn't inclined to sit down and shut up -- well, unless it's on the seat of a bicycle.
"More people need joy in their lives and there's a real simple way to get it: ride a bicycle," Martin told me. "It's a joyous thing to ride a bike."
The Baton Rouge, La., bicyclist hasn't owned a car in 20 years -- "I just love my bike," he said. In fact, he loves biking so much that he said he was driving people crazy talking about the need for better biking and pedestrian infrastructure in his community. Somebody ought to do something about it, he thought, and so he did.…
lborkowski | September 27, 2011DC's Capital Bikeshare program has had a fantastic first year. Stations full of sturdy red bikes have been popping up all over the city, and the system logged its one millionth ride one the eve of its first anniversary. Members can take a bike from any of the more than 100 stations, and the ride is free if they return it within half an hour to any station. (The system is still figuring out how to keep the most popular stations from being emptied out or completely full at rush hour, but the new stations that will come online over the next year should help.) Now I learn that Capital Bikeshare…