Effects of the Residential Environment on Health in Japan Linked with Travel Behavior.

David Perez Barbosa,Hajime Seya,Junyi Zhang

doi:10.3390/ijerph13020190

Abstract

This paper aims to clarify how the residential environment is associated with overall health-related quality of life (QOL) via active travel (walking and cycling), by reflecting the influence of different trip purposes in Japan. The health-related QOL includes physical, mental, and social dimensions. For this study we implemented a questionnaire survey in 20 cities in Japan in 2010 and obtained valid answers from 1202 respondents. The residential environment is defined in terms of distances to and densities of different daily facilities extracted from both the survey and external GIS data. We found that the effects of residential environment on active travel behavior are mixed and limited, depending on types of trip makers. Unexpectedly, travel behavior has no direct effects on the health-related QOL. The residential environment, which is only observed indirectly via lifestyle habits for commuters, has limited effects on health. As for noncommuters, neither their travel behavior nor the residential environment influences their health-related QOL.

Highlights

It is generally accepted that the promotion of active travel in daily life can contribute to the improvement of health conditions, especially if cycling and walking replace short-distance car trips [1]
Body mass index (BMI), as a convenient measure of obesity, has been widely adopted to measure the health level in many existing studies. This indicator is to some extent suitable to explain the differences of physical health caused by residential environment in countries such as USA
In Japan, clear associations between obesity, population density, and other environment features could not be clearly found in this study and other studies [48]

Summary

Introduction

It is generally accepted that the promotion of active travel (cycling and walking) in daily life can contribute to the improvement of health conditions, especially if cycling and walking replace short-distance car trips [1]. Even if commuters just walk a short distance (e.g., 100 m) from home to the station, station to work (or another destination) and/or walk between stations, repeating it daily is surely a form of physical exercise, which may be beneficial to people’s physical health. Encouraging people to walk and/or ride a bicycle more in their daily life is expected to increase their level of performing physical activities, which may have significant health benefits [7,8,9,10,11,12]

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Conclusion