In this project we lay the scientific foundations of a health impact assessment (HIA) tool that will be readily applied to a wide variety of urban settings in Low or Middle Income Countries (LMICs) to estimate health impacts of transport choices.

Globally, transport is a major contributor to the determinants of population health. These impacts are at their starkest in LMICs with rapidly increasing urbanisation and motorisation. The burden of road traffic injuries (RTIs) is predicted to rise globally from the 9th to 7th leading cause of death. In India there are an estimated 200,000 deaths per year, while Africa has the highest per capita burden. Urban outdoor air pollution (AP) also poses a large burden, greatest in Asia. The contribution of road transport to AP concentrations varies considerably, both between and within countries, but even where the percentage is small impacts can be large. At the same time LMICs face a growing burden of chronic diseases associated with lack of physical activity (PA).

TIGTHAT was funded by an MRC Global Challenge Foundation Award from April 2017 to March 2019.

Outputs

Published papers, reports and events

TIGTHAT publications on the MRC Epidemiology Unit publications database.

• Giallouros G, Kouis P, Papatheodorou SI, Woodcock J, Tainio M. The health risks and benefits of restricting cycling and walking on in high air pollution days: Health Impact Modelling study. Environment International 2020.
• Elvik R, Goel R. Safety-in-numbers: an updated meta-analysis of estimates. Accident Analysis & Prevention (2019) (co-funded with METAHIT project).
• Goel R, Garcia L, Goodman A, Johnson R, Aldred R, Murugesan M, Bhalla K, Woodcock J. Estimating city-level travel patterns using street imagery: A case study of using Google Street View in Britain PLOS ONE (2018)
• Aldred R, Goel R, Woodcock J, Goodman A. Contextualising Safety in Numbers: a longitudinal investigation into change in cycling safety in Britain, 1991–2001 and 2001–2011 (externally led). Injury Prevention (2017)
• Tiwari G, & Singh N. (2018). Travel to Work in India: Current Patterns and Future Concerns (No. TRIPP PR-18-01). Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Programme, the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi. (2018)
• Garcia L, Tatah L, Kyere-Gyeabour E, Goel R, Tainio M, Woodcock J. (2017). Health impacts of transportation choices and alternative scenarios in Accra, Ghana: report on data availability and suitability. Report commissioned by World Health Organization Urban Health Initiative. Cambridge, UK.
• Woodcock J, Abbas S, Garcia L, Goel R, Johnson R, Johnson A. (2018). Health impacts of transportation choices and alternative scenarios in Accra, Ghana: final report. Report commissioned by World Health Organization Urban Health Initiative. Cambridge, UK.
• A special session is being organised at the World Conference on Transport Research, Mumbai 2019. Health Impact Modelling of Transport in Lower and Middle Income Settings.
• WHO BreatheLife Conference – workshop on transportation and health (model demonstration in partnership with WHO Urban Health Initiative).
• 4th Safer City Streets Network Meeting – talk on estimating city-level burden of road-traffic-collision fatalities.

Submitted

• Goel R, Miranda J, Gouveia N, Woodcock J. Using satellite imagery to estimate heavy vehicle volume for ecological road safety analysis in India. Accident Analysis & Prevention.
• Johnson R, Woodcock J, Nazelle de A, Sa de T, Goel R, Tainio M, Jackson C. A guide to Value of Information methods for prioritising research in health impact modelling arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.00008. Medical Decision Making.

In preparation

• Garcia L et al. Health impacts of changes in population travel patterns in Accra, Ghana.  (a collaboration with WHO Urban Health Initiative).
• Goel R et al. Who hits whom? A city-level study of traffic fatalities covering low, middle and high-income settings. Proposed journal: Injury Prevention.
• Goel R et al. Who cycles, how far, and for what purpose? Data from 14 countries, across 4 continents. Proposed journal: Transport Reviews.
• Heydari S et al. Contribution of traffic to particulate matter concentration in urban areas using a Bayesian meta-regression approach.
• Jain, D., Sharma, A., Singh, N., Malayath, M., Goel, R., Woodcock, J.,Tainio, M., Tiwari, G. Assessment of national information repository and database(s) for modelling health impacts of urban transport in India.
• Verma A et al. Fatality Risk Analysis of Vulnerable Road Users in Bangalore City. Proposed journal: Accident analysis and prevention
• Verma A et al. Frameworks for developing emission inventory in the context of developing economies- A review. Proposed journal: Environmental Pollution.
• Verma A et al. Understanding the Impact of active transportation on Health- A case study of Bangalore city. Proposed journal: Journal of Transport Geography
• Woodcock J et al. A model for estimating health impacts of transport scenarios. ITHIM R.
• Woodcock J et al. Health impacts of transport scenarios. Results from Latin America, India, and Africa.

Related work

World Health Organization Urban Health Initiative – Accra, Ghana

Collaboration with World Health Organization Urban Health Initiative and local stakeholders in Accra, Ghana, to promote the adoption of health impact assessment methods, tools, and results for informing transportation policies. See papers/reports published and in preparation for a list of outputs. Other outputs include workshops with local stakeholders and a promotional video depicting the model, results, and next steps.

METAHIT

This study represents a sister study to METAHIT. In METAHIT we are investigating how far we can go with a setting with good data. In TIGTHAT we are laying the foundation for a globally applicable model that can cover settings with diverse and typically limited data

GDAR

This study forms part of the global health work at the MRC Epidemiology Unit and is linked to the GDAR network  https://www.mrc-epid.cam.ac.uk/research/global-public-health/

Workshop Cambridge

A workshop and hackathon are being organised in Cambridge “Re-visioning Transport and Health 2019” about how we can use computer vision of transport and the built environment to benefit population health in lower and middle income countries https://sites.google.com/view/transportcam2019/

TIGTHAT is a collaboration between:

• University of Cambridge (Dr James Woodcock, Dr Soren Brage, Dr Ali Abbas, Dr Marko Tainio, Dr Rahul Goel, Dr Leandro Garcia)
• University of Chicago (Dr Kavi Bhalla)
• CRONICAS Centre of Excellence for Chronic Diseases (Dr Jaime Miranda)
• Imperial College London (Dr Audrey de Nazelle)
• Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (Prof Geetam Tiwari)
• Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru (Dr Ashish Verma)
• University of Sao Paulo (Dr Nelson Gouveia)

With support from the:

• World Resources Institute/ Embarq (Dr Benjamin Welle)
• World Health Organization (Dr Thiago de Sa)

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Data sharing

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