More evidence on the health benefits of active transport

“Women who averaged approx. 4400 steps/d had significantly lower mortality rates [..] compared with the least active women who took approx. 2700 steps/d; as more steps per day were accrued, mortality rates progressively decreased before leveling at approximately 7500 steps/d.”

This is from a new paper that just came out in JAMA (via Eric Topol). And yes, the authors are have addressed reverse causation bias. Read the methods section.

Fig. Dose-Response Association Between Mean Steps per Day and All-Cause Mortality

credit: I-Min Lee et al. 2019

How Barcelona is taking city streets back from cars

The team at Vox have produced some interesting videos on urban-related topics. I've posted a few of them here in the blog before. This one below covers the urban planning in Barcelona, which uses superblocks as a means to build more liveable and inclusive urban environments in parts of the city.

This video is actually from 2 years ago but I only saw this video last week (thanks to the recommendation of  Telmo Amand, who was my high-school geography teacher!)

Assorted Links

1. Thanks to Geoff Boeing's great work, you can easily create isochrone maps for anywhere in the world automatically with Python and its OSMnx package
   
   
2. Christian Brand (TSU/Oxford) is one of the co-authors of a new WHO report on "Health economic assessment tools (HEAT) for walking and for cycling"
   
   
3. An AI experiment to find unsafe housing using street-level images, by Jonathan Jay
   
   
4. The Right to the City: Free Ebook Download
   
   
5. Rio's mega-event transportation investments did not address inequalities (or even improve mobility)
   
   
6. call for papers on supply chain and logistics:  2018 MIT SCALE Latin America Conference
   
   
7. The Harvard University Data Science Initiative is seeking applications for its Harvard Data Science Postdoctoral Fellows Program for the 2018-2019 academic year
   
   
8. Google has been mapping air pollution using Google Street View cars. So far, they've measured over one billion air quality data points and now air quality scientists can request access to their data

Assorted links

1. Personal details of ~200 million US citizens exposed. A 1.1 terabyte data set with names, home addresses, phone numbers, political views etc. This is approx. 2/3 of the american population. Probably the largest data leak in history  thus far 
   
   
   
   
2. New panel study with more than 260 K participants in the UK shows Biking to work is linked to lower risk of heart disease, cancer, and early death via Leo Monasterio
   
   
   
   
3. An alternative to lat long coordinates: A global addressing system, based on 57 trillion 3mx3m squares, each addressed with 3 simple words 
   
   
   
   
4. I've recently found out that the principal scientist at Amazon‘s Modeling and Optimization team is Renato Werneck, a Brazilian researcher who is also one of the authors of Raptor, the Round-Based Public Transit Routing algorithm
   
   
   
   
5. Incredible Photos Capture Street Scenes of São Paulo, Brazil in 1862 and 1887
   
   
   
   
6. Pyongyang photo series by Raphael Olivier
   
   
   
   
7. In the USA, both Democrats and Republicans agree there is a lot of discrimination against certain social groups. They just disagree which groups are discriminated against
   
   
   
   
8. Health Effects of Overweight and Obesity in 195 Countries over 25 Years. Since 1980, obesity rates doubled in more than 70 countries and continuously increased in other countries

Prevalence of Obesity at the Global Level, According to Sociodemographic Index (SDI)

[click on the image to enlarge it]

Who use active transportation in Brazil?

The proportion of workers who cycle or walk to work in Brazil is approximately 33%, a similar proportion found in France (34.9%) and Holland (37.9%). Yet, cycling and walking as modes of transport are strongly associated with lower income groups in Brazil. Depending on the metropolitan area, the use of active transportation is two to five times more frequent among low-income individuals than among high-income individuals.

In a recent paper, some colleagues and I discuss the socioeconomic and regional differences in active transportation in Brazil using nationally representative data from 2008 (here is the paper in Portuguese). We've been working on a new paper that updates these data and analyzes the relationship between active transport and health outcomes in the country.

click on the image to enlarge it

Inequalities, cities, big data, transport and health

These are the core issues covered in five special issues of top journals this year, what I think reflects how these topics and particularly cities and social inequality have gained strong momentum in recent years.

• Nature: Science and Inequality
• Nature: a  not so  new urban agenda and the UN’s Habitat III meeting
• Science: Urban Planet
• Built Environment: Big data and the city
• The Lancet: Urban design, transport, and health