Transportation and Determinants of Health Issue 2022

Running head: TRANSPORTATION AND DETERMINANTS OF HEALTH 1
Transportation and Determinants of Health
Name
Institutional Affiliation

TRANSPORTATION AND DETERMINANTS OF HEALTH 2
TRANSPORTATION AND DETERMINANTS OF HEALTH
Introduction
Australian transportation system adds up to hundreds of billion dollars per year in traffic
crashes, physical inactivity and air pollution. However, health remains characteristically never
considered in the transportation planning and policy despite transportation being one of the
social, economic and environmental variables that influence the individual and community health
at large.
The evidence is that transportation links people from their origin to destinations, affects
the use of land, and shapes everyday lives (Maxwell, Young, Crespi, Vega, Cayetano & Bastani,
2015). Transportation is also required to access services, goods, and activities like emergency
services, adequate clothing and food, health care, social activities, education and employment.
Transportation further touches several aspects of life of an individual, and hence adequate as
well as reliable transportation services remain fundamental to healthy persons and communities.
Transportation challenges or problems affect both rural and urban communities and the
seniors in the society, less educated, minority, female, or low income-or have a blend of such
characteristics-stay significantly affected by barriers to transportation. Elderly people, children
and veterans are specifically susceptible to barriers to transportation because of social
exclusion/isolation, greater needs for often clinician visits as well as comorbidities.
Issues with transportation influence people differently based on how distinguished
challenges overlap. For instance, a low income individual who struggles with travel might have a
surged burden if she experiences a provisional physical disability (Widener & Hatzopoulou,
2016). Restrained literacy in health, cognitive impairment, and health history fragmentation,

TRANSPORTATION AND DETERMINANTS OF HEALTH 3
access to health insurance, food insecurity or poverty can interlink at any point in time and hence
affect communities and individuals.
How Transportation Affects SDH
Whereas motorized transportation modes are still dominating the industry-resulting in
increased pollution of air, traffic crashes, and declined physical activities-the opportunities
abound to surge the alternative transportations options which support cycling and walking and
improve our health. The Australian transportation system remains a web of highways, sidewalks,
roads, bridges, trains, bike paths, alongside busies which connect individuals to one another and
to destination where they work, learn, play and live. Whereas such a system has surged the
mobility and access to services and goods, it depends primarily on the motorized transportation-
and which has health consequences (Lee & Sener, 2016).
Such a motorized transportation means more individual vehicles on the roads and less
public transit which leads to high production of air pollutants from the emissions which is an
environmental determinant of health. The result of this is that there will be increased
deterioration of quality of air that people breathe and hence increased incidence of
cardiovascular diseases like asthma and other respiratory conditions. This results in increased
risks of cardiovascular mortality and morbidity due to the increased chronic and acute exposure
to particulate matter (PM) air pollution (environmental determinant of health). This is because
studies have shown that even a short-run exposure to PM 2.5 over a few hours would trigger
myocardial infarctions, arrhythmias, ischemia, and heart failure, exacerbation of peripheral
arterial disease, stroke and abrupt death. Further, chronic exposure to abstemiously elevated
levels of PM from transport emissions hastens the risk of developing a range of cardiovascular