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SALT LAKE CITY — Utah’s transportation sector is better when the public health sector is involved, according to Heather Borski, director of the Utah Department of Health’s disease control and prevention division.
On Thursday’s Move Utah Summit at Little America Hotel in Salt Lake City, transportation and public health professionals discussed the intersections between public health, active transportation, housing density and even flying cars.
“Transportation policy is health policy,” Borski said. “We cannot do our work as public health professionals without the support of the transportation sector.”
Borski added that active transportation — walking or bicycling to a destination — plays a “key role” in making physical activity easier for residents through the use of trails, sidewalk improvements, and first-and-last mile infrastructure, which is the transit gap between public transit and someone’s final destination.
Rep. Suzanne Harrison, D-Draper, a proponent of active transportation, explained her passion for promoting physical activity among children as it leads to academic and mental health benefits.
“We really need to get people out of their cars,” she said. “We’ve got to get where we need to go in healthier ways."
Utah Transit Authority board member Kent Millington called himself a “recent convert” to active transportation. He said he used to not understand the need to provide safe passage for those who wanted to ride bikes when more roads could be built for cars.
“As we built roads with bike lanes and trails, it became clear that they were really useful for the community,” he said.
In a panel discussion titled “The Cure for an Unhealthy Community,” Get Healthy Utah executive director Sarah Hodson hopes others see Utah’s population boom not as a negative, but as an opportunity to create healthier communities.
She said a recent Utah-based health survey showed that residents weren’t eating healthy because it was easier and quicker to access junk foods or fast food, and residents weren’t exercising after work because they had no time left in the day due to working too many hours.
She said the survey results have framed how she looks at approaches regarding active transportation.
Rather than asking people to go to the gym after work, providing safe places where people can walk during the day is more helpful, she said.
As we built roads with bike lanes and trails, it became clear that they were really useful for the community.
–Utah Transit Authority board member Kent Millington
Wasatch Front Regional Council deputy director Ted Knowlton believes the recipe for creating healthy communities is a mix of density, mixed land use, street connectivity and activity centering.
“Higher density (is) better for public health,” he said, adding that shortening distances between places creates more opportunities to travel to destinations on foot or bike.
“It’s part of the recipe, you have to upgrade infrastructure, that is part of the recipe to create a walking and ‘bikeable’ city,” Knowlton said.
Understandably, he said, it’s common for people with “not-in-my-backyard logic” to not see the value of density or the positive impacts it could have on their health, which includes the increase of transit riders, cleaner air and a walkable community.
Examples of new downtowns located in Bountiful, Murray, Sandy and Ogden benefit from street connectivity and have become popular among residents, he said.
“We think that the only downtowns we can have are historic downtowns,” he said. “We don’t let ourselves imagine new downtowns enough.”
During a break-out session focusing on the rise of self-driving cars and the future of flying cars, moderator Travis Olsen, community health educator at Weber-Morgan Health Department, focused the conversation on how the new technology could impact a person’s health.
UDOT transportation technology director Blaine Leonard said each year 37,000 people die in road crashes in the U.S., and 94% of those are crashes are caused by human error.
“This is a significant problem,” he said.
But it’s a problem that could be solved with the help of autonomous vehicles, he said, which would eliminate human error.
While most people envision flying cars as something from a science fiction movie, UDOT aeronautics director Jared Esselman believes flying cars are a technological advance of the near future.
Earlier this year, a drone delivered a kidney to a patient at a Maryland hospital, he noted. Esselman said drones and flying vehicles could change healthcare by providing quicker services to patients and reducing the cost of healthcare.
Citing the 1985 film “Back to the Future,” Olsen hopes the current generation is able to embrace new technology in a helpful way so that there’s no desire to prevent problems of the past in the future.
