Grant: Operating Grant: Data Analysis - Healthy Cities Intervention Research

Walking and bicycling are healthy and environmentally friendly forms of transportation. Healthy cities encourage active transportation because it has many benefits to cities and their residents. But people walking and bicycling are more vulnerable to road injury and safety concerns may affect the choice to use active transportation. While Canada has good information on the number of injuries and fatalities among pedestrians and bicyclists, this is not enough to tell us about the rates and risks of injury among users of active transportation. For risk and rate calculations, we need to know how many people use each form and how much they use it (how far and how long they travel). This will then allow "apples to apples" comparisons between groups such as men and women, or between provinces and cities, or within cities before and after changes are made to try to improve safety. Our project will help fill this gap in our knowledge. We will use data created by Statistics Canada and Health Canada: the Canadian Census Health and Environment Cohort (CanCHEC). This is a cohort that follows participants in the long form Canadian census and determines health outcomes they experience over follow-up. The long form census collects information on how people get to and from work, which will allow us to isolate bicycling and walking commuters to determine their risk of injury. We will use records of hospital treatment (including cause of injury) to determine who has been injured and death records (including cause) to determine fatalities. We will examine how risk of injury differs between men and women, by age, by measures of wealth, and by scores that measure whether their neighbourhood design encourages active transportation. This project will build new ways to evaluate, compare and monitor risk among active transportation users for cities, city planners, health care providers, injury researchers and road safety advocates.