Is Transportation a Proxy for Health?

When our own country’s American Society of Civil Engineers gives our public transit system a D-minus rating, you know it’s pretty bad.

It’s undeniable that America’s fixation on cars embodies “land of the free and home of the brave”. Amidst hyper-individualism yet also necessity, using a personal vehicle for your mode of transportation is the expected norm in the U.S. In a land plagued with unwalkable cities and underdeveloped transportation systems, busses, subways, and trains, are often seen as a last resort.

While our public transit and pedestrian facilities are quite feeble, they are still an everyday mode of transportation for several people. Though, how may transportation in general, not just public, intersect with several demographics our society? In which ways are health and transportation intertwined?

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To give a go at unearthing what transportation’s potential influence on social factors could be, I pulled data from U.S. Census API and U.S. county-level health outcomes for the year of 2022. After playing around with different variables for quite a bit, something that threw me off-guard was this:

Having your own car, and being able to use it to go wherever, is one of the prime examples of freedom in the United States. Often, it portrays you’re more likely well off than not, perhaps have a job, and are a functioning member of your society. So when I saw the moderate positive relationship between using personal vehicles as a primary mode of transportation to work and frequent mental distress, I was dumbfounded.

With a correlation of .41, it is not crazy to consider there might be a genuine relationship going on here. Out of the several variables I checked within my census data, their correlation with one another was one of the highest (excluding given relationships like poverty and unemployment). It would be assumed that typically, having your own car and getting to use it to go wherever needed is equated to success and perhaps happiness. Yet perhaps this isn’t a question about success. Is it that people want to use their car in majority car counties, or is it that they simply have no choice?

Likely, it is the later. The United States rates rather low on the walkability scale, and Americans walk substantially less than several countries. Often, there are certainly still destinations or stores within reachable distance without a vehicle, but many of our roads have either poorly maintained sidewalks or little to no sidewalks or crosswalks at all, therefore deeming them unreachable. While of course in some places it is a danger to walk due to elevated crime rates, safety is truly affected by the infrastructure of our roads. We also cannot ignore the fact that in 2022, we reached a 40-year high in U.S. pedestrian deaths. Much of this can be attributed to how little space is accommodated for pedestrians, our roads getting the most attention and expansions compared to sidewalks, crosswalks, and bike lanes.

So, without being able to walk, get outside, easily have accessible public transportation, and instead being sequestered to driving to get to any destination, this can certainly take a toll on health. Physical and mental health flourishes in places with higher walkability. While encouraging more physical activity and preventing more disease and obesity, this trickles down to benefitting mental health as they are intersected.

Here, I’ve expanded on a few other variables to understand more about this positive trend in personal vehicle use and frequent mental health distress. Interestingly enough, there is an evident decrease in life expectancy with counties that are car dominant, the gradient going from darker (higher life expectancy) to lighter as personal vehicle use increases. I also included “children in poverty” to reflect the overall economic standing of these counties. In many situations as seen here, counties with higher personal vehicle dominance reflects increased levels of poverty. This could be attributed to lower-income counties likely being underfunded, having less support for sidewalks and public transit, and therefore being unsafe to use. Clearly, poverty, higher dominance of personal vehicle transport, mental health and life expectancy are intertwined.

Though, how might this change when we look at other means of transportation, like using the bus?

This shocked me a little as well. Although not the strongest relationship with just a correlation of -.19, I still felt it important to include as there is clearly a downward trend between mental distress and dominant transportation by bus. It’s a little ironic. Public transit and busses are typically viewed as used by those who are in poverty or unemployed, which rings true as my code yielded a positive relationship for the two. Yet fascinatingly, while mental health distress increased amidst poverty (I checked in my code as well), as seen here, it does the opposite when using the bus as a primary mode of transportation. But how does this work? Again, I propose this could likely be due to counties with higher income averages have more or are more able to direct funding for their road, public transit, and pedestrian facilities.

It’s fascinating how transportation can reflect various factors of our lives, from income to health. Though this is just about the present. Does this imply that sustainability, the direction of our future, may increase mental health? Only time will tell, yet hopefully, changes will be made to maintain this trend.