We held a seminar with speakers Professor Jennifer Mindell and Dr Nadine Dodge. What happens when you can’t get where you need to go because of busy roads? Apart from feeling frustrated is it bad for your health? Watch the video.

‘Community severance’ occurs where transport infrastructure or the volume and/or speed of traffic limit people’s access to good, services and people. It has long been assumed that this is detrimental to health but little research has examined this. Jenny’s presentation will describe some early research on community severance and her work to develop a toolkit to measure the barrier effect of busy roads and its effect on local residents.

Nadine Dodge will provide a local perspective on this issue by discussing what Wellington City Council is doing to address community severance.

Presentation: Jennifer Mindell, Community severance- the barrier effects of busy roads, pdf

Jennifer Mindell

Dr Jennifer Mindell

Speakers

  • Dr Jennifer Mindell is Professor of Public Health at UCL, where she conducts research on transport and health, particularly community severance (the barrier effects of busy roads) and road casualty rates for different travel modes. Her main role is leading the UCL team that works with NatCen Social Research (as the Joint Health Surveys Unit) to run the Health Survey for England, the second most downloaded government dataset on the UK Data Service. A public health doctor, she is based in UCL’s Research Department of Epidemiology & Public Health but works across faculties, for example to develop tools to measure the effects of busy roads on local communities. She is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Transport and Health. Jenny is on the Executive of the International Professional Association for Transport & Health (IPATH) and of the Transport and Health Science Group (THSG), and is convenor of the network for Mobility for wellbeing and health in Latin America, MoBiSaL.
  • Dr Nadine Dodge is a Senior Adviser, Transport Strategy at Wellington City Council. Her work focuses on the interactions between urban form, transport, and wider social and environmental outcomes. Her doctoral thesis examined housing preferences in New Zealand and the impact of location choice on transport behaviour.

This seminar took place on 20 March 2019 at the University of Otago, Wellington 23a Mein St, Newtown, Wellington.

For more information please contact libby.grant@otago.ac.nz.

Behaviour Change Energy Health Transport Urban design & planning