BACKGROUND The Guide to Community Preventive Services recommends implementing community- and street-scale urban design, as well as land use policies and practices, to promote walking and bicycling. To better understand barriers to municipal walking and bicycling projects and policies, we surveyed municipal staff in North Carolina. METHODS We surveyed all 121 municipalities with at least 5,000...

INTRODUCTION Bicycling is promoted as a transportation and population health strategy globally. Yet bicycling has low uptake in North America (1%-2% of trips) compared with European bicycling cities (15%-40% of trips) and shows marked sex and age trends. Safety concerns due to collisions with motor vehicles are primary barriers.To attract the broader population to bicycling, many cities are mak...

OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to calculate exposure-based bicycling hospitalisation rates in Canadian jurisdictions with different helmet legislation and bicycling mode shares, and to examine whether the rates were related to these differences. METHODS Administrative data on hospital stays for bicycling injuries to 10 body region groups and national survey data on bicycling trips w...

Strategies that facilitate increased bicycle use have the potential to reduce vehicle trips and vehicle miles traveled (VMT) by shifting trips from cars to bicycles and even from cars to transit. Bicycling strategies fall into two main categories: (1) infrastructure projects that improve bicycle accessibility, safety, and convenience, either while traveling or at the end of the trip, and (2) pr...

Bicycling is a popular activity and a healthy, environmentally friendly form of transportation. However, it is also a leading cause of sport and recreational injury in children and adolescents. Head injuries are among the most severe injuries sustained while bicycling, justifying the implementation of bicycle helmet legislation by many provinces. There is evidence that bicycle helmet legislatio...

OBJECTIVES To assess existing research on the effects of various interventions on levels of bicycling. Interventions include infrastructure (e.g., bike lanes and parking), integration with public transport, education and marketing programs, bicycle access programs, and legal issues. METHODS A comprehensive search of peer-reviewed and non-reviewed research identified 139 studies. Study methodo...

OBJECTIVES To investigate whether bicycling to school improves cardiometabolic risk factor profile and cardiorespiratory fitness among children. DESIGN Prospective, blinded, randomised controlled trial. SETTING Single centre study in Odense, Denmark PARTICIPANTS 43 children previously not bicycling to school were randomly allocated to control group (n=20) (ie, no change in lifestyle) or i...

OBJECTIVE To examine the impact of traffic on levels of walking and bicycling. METHOD Review of the literature of medical, public health, city planning, public administration and traffic engineering. RESULTS The real and perceived danger and discomfort imposed by traffic discourage walking and bicycling. Accurately or not, pedestrians and bicyclists judge injury risk and respond accordingly...

Some claim that car-dependent cities contribute to obesity by discouraging walking and bicycling. In this article, we use household activity data from the San Francisco region to study the links between urban environments and nonmotorized travel. We used factor analysis to represent the urban design and land-use diversity dimensions of built environments. Combining factor scores with control va...