Policies to help people walk and cycle such as low-traffic neighbourhoods can create public health benefits as much as 100 times greater than the cost of the schemes, a long-term study of active travel measures has concluded.
The research, based on six years of surveys among thousands of people living in three outer London boroughs that introduced LTNs or similar schemes, found they tended to prompt people to switch some trips from cars to active travel, although the effects were varied
I suspect this may be slightly biased, being that London is relatively flat compared to some areas, and London has a far better public transport network than most of the country.
How is a health benefit assigned a money-value? Arbitrarily, based on how much could be extracted from you in productive labour, or based on how much money is saved a health service meant to serve us, not *vice versa*?
Why merely weigh against what it cost to implement, and not all the genuine cost of impeded travel for a community?
In light of this I’d suggest QALYs as an alternative measure of comparison, provided the rubric was made open to critique.
Edit: I *do* apologise. I have so greatly failed to contribute to the discussion, by – irrelevantly, irritatingly, noisomely – querying, linking to and quoting from the study this news article is about, that my comment deserves to be hidden. That was simply *so* uncontributory of me.
So this is an argument for intevrening to boost public health through the exercise gained through travelling without a car, rather than anything against pollution per se?
Nice try Klaus Schwab, you aren’t going to lock me in my house today.
I’m going to drive around some LTNs just to make myself and everyone else sick on purpose.
*Freedom*
It’s been my experience that many British people don’t care about good health until their own fails.
6 comments
Policies to help people walk and cycle such as low-traffic neighbourhoods can create public health benefits as much as 100 times greater than the cost of the schemes, a long-term study of active travel measures has concluded.
The research, based on six years of surveys among thousands of people living in three outer London boroughs that introduced LTNs or similar schemes, found they tended to prompt people to switch some trips from cars to active travel, although the effects were varied
I suspect this may be slightly biased, being that London is relatively flat compared to some areas, and London has a far better public transport network than most of the country.
How is a health benefit assigned a money-value? Arbitrarily, based on how much could be extracted from you in productive labour, or based on how much money is saved a health service meant to serve us, not *vice versa*?
Why merely weigh against what it cost to implement, and not all the genuine cost of impeded travel for a community?
[For those interested, here is a link to the study.](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214140524000173)
In light of this I’d suggest QALYs as an alternative measure of comparison, provided the rubric was made open to critique.
Edit: I *do* apologise. I have so greatly failed to contribute to the discussion, by – irrelevantly, irritatingly, noisomely – querying, linking to and quoting from the study this news article is about, that my comment deserves to be hidden. That was simply *so* uncontributory of me.
So this is an argument for intevrening to boost public health through the exercise gained through travelling without a car, rather than anything against pollution per se?
Nice try Klaus Schwab, you aren’t going to lock me in my house today.
I’m going to drive around some LTNs just to make myself and everyone else sick on purpose.
*Freedom*
It’s been my experience that many British people don’t care about good health until their own fails.