Health and equity considerations in policy and practice related to sustainable transportation interventions in four Canadian cities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cities around the world are making major investments in sustainable transportation infrastructure in response to diverse societal challenges. These projects have the potential to advance healthy cities, but it is unknown to what extent municipalities incorporate health and equity goals into sustainable transportation policy and practice. We provide an empirical analysis of how health and equity were understood, operationalized, and measured in the planning, design, and implementation of four sustainable transportation projects in four Canadian cities, Victoria, Vancouver, Saskatoon, and Montreal, as part of the INTerventions, Equity, Research, and Action in Cities Team (INTERACT) project. We reviewed nine policy documents that guided the sustainable transportation interventions and conducted content analysis to understand how health and equity were referred to within public-facing policy documents. We also interviewed 23 city staff, councillors, or members of advocacy groups who were involved in the planning, design, and implementation of these interventions and conducted framework analysis on the transcripts. We developed themes from integrated findings of our policy scan and interviews with practitioners. We found that health was broadly used in the policy framing, and that safety and modal shift towards active modes were key health outcomes in both policy and practice. Other health outcomes were described as co-benefits but were minimally operationalized and had limited influence on the prioritization of municipal investments. Equity priorities in policies and practice centered on design and implementation features geared towards equity-deserving groups and accessibility for all ages and abilities. Participants emphasized the importance of policy and political will for advancing equity goals and navigating trade-offs between prioritizing high-use or equity-focused routes. Participants also described challenges with measuring health (due to institutional mandates) and equity (due to lack of disaggregated data). These findings highlight the opportunities for clearer direction in policy and practice in relation to health and equity goals in sustainable transportation interventions. • Health and equity considerations in sustainable transportation planning can have widespread impacts. • In policy and practice, health was primarily considered as safety and modal shift. • Policies considered equity through the needs of equity-deserving groups and establishing a hierarchy of modes. • City staff also considered spatial equity and need for equitable engagement. • Municipalities face challenges in measuring health and equity outcomes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".