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Road traffic is a major cause of adverse
health effects – ranking with smoking and diet as one of the most important
health determinants in Europe.
Traffic-related air pollution, noise and vibration, traffic accidents
and the social impacts of road traffic (e.g. community severance and isolation)
combine to generate a wide range of adverse health consequences, including
respiratory and cardio-vascular illness, cancer, physical injury and
stress-related illnesses.
These health effects are a source of major
public concern, as evidenced by numerous recent Eurobarometer
and other attitudinal surveys in Europe. As a
result, increasing effort is being devoted across the EU to develop new transport
plans and policies, which can reduce the health risks of road traffic. These include new air quality standards (e.g.
under the EU Air Quality Framework and its daughter directives), new emission
and safety standards for road vehicles, and – in almost every country and every
city of the EU – new traffic management strategies and schemes. Recently the scope of EU environmental
policies has been further enlarged to include urban planning and spatial
development policies, aimed at integrating short and long term land use and
transport measures in order to support more sustainable patterns of transport
and urban development, which should ultimately have a positive impact on the
health of urban populations. Nevertheless,
these policies remain relatively poorly informed. Neither the scale of the health risks of road
traffic, nor their distribution across the population, are well
characterised. Consequently, little is
known about who is at risk, about how the various risk
factors interact to affect human health, or about how best to manage these
multiple risks in an effective and integrated manner. Moreover, it remains difficult to compare
different road land use or transport policies and strategies in terms of the
multiple exposures and health effects which need to be considered.
The over-riding need is clearly for more
integrated methods for health risk assessment which consider the full range of
exposures and health effects, and can be applied early in the policy or
planning process. Many of the models
(e.g. on road traffic flows, air pollutant dispersion) needed for this purpose
are already available. In order to
provide a rigorous and more integrated measure of health risk, however, new
modelling capability needs to be developed.
While pollution dispersion models are able to provide increasingly
reliable measures of the spatial pattern of air pollution, for example, they
still tend to provide a relatively poor measure of exposure, for they do not
take account of human mobility and behaviour.
Equally, while significant improvements in noise modelling have been
made in recent years, exposure assessment is still relatively weak. Current models of road traffic accidents also
tend to be relatively simplistic, and unsuitable for prospective assessments of
health risks. There is also a need to
quantify more accurately the health risks of these various exposures, for
different sub-groups of the population, and to bring the different models
together within a consistent framework.
This research is aimed at addressing these
needs. Its aim is to develop and apply
an integrated methodology for health risk assessment in order to explore the
multiple health impacts of road traffic, as a basis for informing policy and
improving public health protection.
Within this context, the specific aims are:
- to identify, test,
customise and link models to assess the health risks from traffic-related
air pollution, traffic noise and vibration and traffic accidents;
- to use these
methods to characterise the geographical and social distribution of these
risks within urban areas;
- to investigate the
different time-space patterns shown by these various risk factors in urban
areas and their relationship with human activity patterns and exposures;
- on the basis of
these results, to identify and characterise population subgroups who are
most susceptible to the multiple health risks of transport;
- to investigate the potential of different
transport-related policies to control and mitigate these multiple risks.
The
project will thus build on and extend a number of recent studies of
traffic-related air pollution and health in the EU, notably the EXPOLIS-I and
EAS-EXPOLIS studies (1), APHEA (2) and SAVIAH (3, 4, 5, 6). As part of this project, we will review these
studies and conduct a semi-quantitative meta-analysis of relevant findings in
order to construct dose-response functions for the various exposures and health
endpoints of interest. We will also
incorporate results from ongoing reviews, such as that by the Department of
Public Health Sciences, St George’s Hospital, London.
An
important part of this study will be to ascertain and incorporate measures of
uncertainty in these dose-response and effect estimates. This will be done using a Bayesian: the
partners participating in this project have extensive expertise in Bayesian statistical analysis, on which this work will
draw.
The project will also provide important
results of relevance to many current studies on transport technologies and
management – for example the AutoOil studies and
AIR-EIA.
Expected achievements from the study
include:
- new models for the
assessment of accident risks and exposures to air and noise pollution;
- an integrated suite
of models for assessing and comparing the multiple health risks of urban
transport;
- a generic tool,
operating within a GIS environment, for health risk assessment of urban
transport systems and associated land use policies, that can be readily
customised to and applied in cities across the EU;
- a set of case
studies, illustrating and testing the use of these methods in different
urban environments;
- improved
understanding of the geographic and social distribution of the different
health risks of transport within urban areas;
- clearer
specification and characterisation of the population subgroups most at
risk from these multiple health effects;
- identification and ranking of transport-related policies and
management systems in terms of their ability to target, mitigate and
reduce these risks within these susceptible groups.
This research has a wide range of important
benefits. Inter alia it will contribute to:
·
improved specification
and costing of the health effects of urban transport;
·
improved evaluation and
appraisal of transport-related policies and management interventions in terms
of their health effects;
·
improved ability to
develop and implement more integrated policies aimed at resolving the multiple
effects of transport on health (as opposed to current, often piecemeal
approaches);
·
better targeting of
public health and policy interventions at at-risk groups, with consequent
improvements in effectiveness and efficiency;
·
improved capability to adapt EU and national policies on
transport and health to local conditions and the needs of specific population
groups.
HEARTS project involves the development and
application of an integrated methodology for environmental health impact
assessment in relation to urban transport systems. The methodology to be developed will comprise
seven main types of models:
·
a transport model, which
provides estimates of traffic flow, traffic composition and other traffic
characteristics (including speed) for each area or road link of interest;
·
a suite of air pollution
models, which simulate the emission and dispersion of air pollution from the
transport sector within the urban environment and in different
micro-environments, for key groups of air pollutants (including NOx, particulates, VOCs and
ozone);
·
a noise propagation
model, which simulates the generation and distribution of traffic noise within
the urban area, and in different micro-environments;
·
a traffic accident
model, which simulates the probability distribution of road traffic accidents,
by different travel mode (including cycling and walking) and micro-environment;
·
a set of time-activity
models, which simulate the spatial and temporal distribution of the population
(by population sub-group) in the different micro-environments of interest
(including buildings, vehicles and outdoor environments);
·
a set of exposure models
(for the various air pollutants, noise and accidents) that combines the
outcomes of the air pollution, noise and accident modelling and the
time-activity modelling to estimate population exposure distributions (e.g.
using Monte Carlo or other probabilistic methods);
·
a suite of health effects models, which provide
estimates of the health risk, for different health endpoints, of exposure to
each of these hazards.
These
models will be drawn and developed from existing methods and models, then
linked to create an integrated modelling
system (IMS) by loose-coupling within a geographical information system
(GIS). By providing the capability to
incorporate data of differing resolution, and models of more or less
sophistication, the system will be suitable for operation at a range of
different scales, and in a range of different data conditions – from the whole
city level, to the sub-city level (e.g. for communes or wards) to the
individual street level. By changing the
assumptions within the transport model, the integrated modelling system will
also be capable of analysing the potential health effects of changes in
transport policy or technology. Within
the limits of these transport models, the impacts of longer term land use
strategies and policies on health perspectives can also be analysed.
HEARTS
Project is coordinated by the WHO ECEH office in Rome. |