Health impacts of cycling in Dublin on individual cyclists and on the local population

Abstract

Abstract There is an emerging consensus that personal and societal health benefits in cycling largely outweigh the risks. However, there exists limited research into the health impacts experienced by individuals who take up cycling or the marginal societal benefits resulting from incremental uptake of cycling. This paper models and estimates the health impacts of individuals in Dublin taking up cycling. The paper utilizes the 2011 census data of Ireland and a Burden of Disease (BOD) approach is used to estimate health impacts on the individuals taking up cycling for their regular commute and on the rest of the local population separately. The health impact to an individual changing from private car to cycling ranged from a benefit of 0.033 Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs)/year to a loss of 0.003 DALYs/year. The marginal health impact to the local population ranged from no change to a benefit of 0.006 DALYs/year. Increases in cycling have a consistently positive impact on the health of the local population, regardless of the current modal split. The net expected health impacts to the individual cyclists are also positive in most cases. However, for some individuals in the 20–29 age group, the expected health impact may be small to negative, mainly due to a higher traffic collision risk. Where total impacts of scenarios are modelled the potential negative health impacts to some individuals may be masked by the overall positive health benefits of cycling to the local population. When promoting cycling as an alternative to driving to improve population health impacts, the risks to some cyclists should be managed and mitigated through safe road systems approaches.