Recently much attention is paid to the lack of physical activities that may cause the health problems in many counties. Travel activities provide a certain amount of physical activities, and the active transportation, such as walking and cycling, becomes more important as an essential element of transportation. The active transportation is expected to contribute to improving human health by reducing cardiovascular disease, obesity, and premature death. However, detailed relationship between the transportation choices and human health has not been well understood. Therefore, there is a need for investigating traveler behaviors and how their choices affect physical activities and public health. The first part of the dissertation explores the role of societal cultures and their impact on choosing active transportation modes. Through a multinational survey conducted in the selected cities of the United States, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq, the sociocultural factors that influence transportation mode choices especially active transportation are identified. The second part of the study involves using a mobile application platform named Physical Activity through Smart Travel Activity (PASTA) to monitor the travel and physical activities of transportation users. The PASTA platform includes mobile data communication, big data analysis, activity classification, transportation mode detection, and physical activity quantification on different interfaces, such as smartphones, cloud databases, and computers. The platform provides data to compare physical activities attributable to transportation across different geographical areas. The PASTA platform is tested in Texas and Michigan and proves to be useful in apportioning the total physical activity into travel-related physical activities and non-travel related physical activities. A transportation mode detection (TMD) system is also developed to process the data collected from PASTA based on machine learning techniques. The third part of the dissertation employs the integrated transportation and health impact model (ITHIM) and enhances the concept of ITHIM by adding the quantitative data obtained from PASTA. Mechanisms for collecting data on physical activities (PA) related to or not related to transportation in previous studies relied on questionnaires and interviews of specific samples in the community. Instead, the PASTA platform provides an automated mechanism for gathering the daily activities of people, especially with regard to physical activities and travel behaviors. The study also introduces the physical activity minute (PAM), an indicator of changes in activity levels, which is an alternative to the metabolic equivalence of the task (METs), which is often a constant value for any type of physical activity. By coupling the data from PASTA, this research substantially reduces the limitations in the previous ITHIM and upgrades the model to conform to the current technological advances. The last part of the dissertation discusses the relationship between the levels of physical activity of individuals, their socio-economic features and body shapes using descriptive analysis and path analysis. Three sets of data are used in this study, such as the questionnaire, body shape tests, and physical activity levels associated with transportation. Socio-economic and body shape factors such as race, age, gender, state of residence, percent of body fat, are found to have significant direct and indirect effects on physical activity. The findings of this study help in incorporating human health into transportation planning by addressing health outcomes impacted by physical activities associated with transportation choices considering peoples socioeconomic and body composition profiles. This dissertation makes an effort to analyze and quantify participants actual physical activities by using recent wearable devices with sensing and GPS tracking technology. The dissertation addresses health outcomes impacted by physical activities associated with transportation options. The study provides information that can be used to enhance community awareness of the health benefits that resulted from different transportation mode choices. Overall, the findings of this study can be used to incorporate human health in transportation planning.

Transportation and Health provides state-of-the-art knowledge on the many linkages between transport and health, the available tools needed to estimate and evaluate the health impacts of transport, future technologies, the developments that can change the direction and magnitude of the health impacts, and the policy and education issues that can result in better practice and knowledge translation. The book provides valuable information on how and why to take health into consideration in transport planning and policy, showing how to estimate the impacts of transport on health in planning, policymaking, education and workforce development. Explores the latest advances on the full spectrum of connections between transport and health Offers a "roadmap" on how transport impacts health Includes tools for analyzing and estimating the health impacts of transport Shows what research and practice gaps need attention Includes contributions from leading scholars, practitioners and policymakers

Car-oriented infrastructure in the U.S. leads to physically inactive lifestyles and negative health outcomes. To promote physical activity, public health officials encourage active transportation, namely biking and walking on daily trips. Previous studies proved that both perceived or self-assessed and objective health measures should be used to understand individuals' health status. Therefore, this study uses the National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) data to understand the associations between perceived health and modal trip features including the number of trips, trip distance, and duration for auto, public transit, walk, and bike trips. Regarding the objective health, this dissertation uses one-week walking activities data of a sample population from two universities in the U.S. The walking records include the average resting heart rates and minute-by-minute measures of walking heart rates, burned calories, and the number of steps. The results show that individuals with longer auto trips show lower perceived health; however, the higher frequency and longer active transportation are linked to better perceived health. Also, the cross-analysis results on a sample from one of the universities show that perceived health is not necessarily associated with actual health measures of BMI and physical activity. Regarding the objective physical activity and health, the results show that underweight/normal people, compared with overweight/obese individuals, seem to have lower resting heart rates, longer duration of walking, and a significantly higher number of steps (mean and total). Moreover, the results of modeling the changes in the walking heart rates based on health and activity predictors show that overweight and obese individuals have small changes in walking heart rate due to age and high resting heart rates. On the other hand, greater changes in walking heart rates are observed among the healthier people (with lower resting heart rates), due to their large number of steps, and moderate-to-vigorous minutes of walking.

The health effects of society’s mobility and transport are addressed with a global perspective, including such topics as the effects of air pollution, noise, and sedentarism.

TRB Special Report 282: Does the Built Environment Influence Physical Activity? Examining the Evidence reviews the broad trends affecting the relationships among physical activity, health, transportation, and land use; summarizes what is known about these relationships, including the strength and magnitude of any causal connections; examines implications for policy; and recommends priorities for future research.

Transportation systems constitute of infrastructure, commute modes, land use and other policies. The purpose of transportation is to provide easy access to goods and services. While attaining this purpose, impacts of transportation on human health and well-being have been ignored to some extent. Recently, studies have begun analyzing the impact of transportation systems on quality of life and health disparities. While many studies have discussed the impact of the transportation system on individual factors from health, a very limited number of studies have focused on the impact of multiple factors associated with multiple morbidity and mortality forms. The focus of this study is to analyze how transportation infrastructure can promote physical activities resulting in better health outcomes. Lack of data on transportation infrastructure at county-level in Michigan restricted the study. The Transportation and Health Tool developed by the US Department of Transportation was reviewed and applied to Michigan at a county-level to examine how different counties rank with respect to different transportation indicators corresponding to health conditions. Further, correlation analyses and multinomial linear regression analyses were conducted to determine relationships and impact magnitudes of transportation and socioeconomic factors on human health.

Transportation systems constitute of infrastructure, commute modes, land use and other policies. The purpose of transportation is to provide easy access to goods and services. While attaining this purpose, impacts of transportation on human health and well-being have been ignored to some extent. Recently, studies have begun analyzing the impact of transportation systems on quality of life and health disparities. While many studies have discussed the impact of the transportation system on individual factors from health, a very limited number of studies have focused on the impact of multiple factors associated with multiple morbidity and mortality forms. The focus of this study is to analyze how transportation infrastructure can promote physical activities resulting in better health outcomes. Lack of data on transportation infrastructure at county-level in Michigan restricted the study. The Transportation and Health Tool developed by the US Department of Transportation was reviewed and applied to Michigan at a county-level to examine how different counties rank with respect to different transportation indicators corresponding to health conditions. Further, correlation analyses and multinomial linear regression analyses were conducted in order to determine relationships and impact magnitudes of transportation and socioeconomic factors on human health.