TRB and the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) will host the joint conference "Moving Active Transportation to Higher Ground: Opportunities for Accelerating the Assessment of Health Impacts" in April 2015 in Washington, DC.

This conference will bring together experts and constituents from transportation, urban planning, public health, health care, and health economics to explore the states of the art and practice on quantifying the public health outcomes of active transportation.

Conference focus areas include:

•           Scientific evidence on relationships between active transportation and health

•           Strategies for data collection and methods of data analysis and modeling that contribute to the quantification of impacts on personal, household, and community health as they relate to various aspects of active travel

•           Innovative tools and approaches to assess the impacts of active transportation (e.g., health impact assessments of transportation projects or local, regional, and state planning scenarios), as well as tools to better forecast the effects on active transportation

Abstracts can still be submitted online until 1 October 2014. For more details about the conference and/or to submit and abstract take a look at the following links:

Call for Abstracts: http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/Conferences/2015/ActiveTransportation/Announcement&CallforAbstracts.pdf

TRB Blurb about the Conference: http://www.trb.org/Main/Blurbs/171123.aspx

Abstract Submission Website (note: you will have to create an account to submit an abstract): http://precis2.preciscentral.com/Public/UserLogin.aspx?P=D805325BAA88D2EA2441CFF7B631BD73

Please feel free to forward this email.

P.S.: Here are more details about the conference. You will find the same information when following the links provided above:

"There is growing recognition in the transportation, planning, and public health fields that transportation systems and policies designed to increase bicycling and walking may enable more physical activity and help improve personal and community health. While the relationships between land‐use patterns, transportation options, and public health seem intuitive, they remain difficult to study, quantify, and understand. If health outcomes are to be more routinely integrated into planning and transportation investment decision‐making, these relationships will need to be robustly demonstrated, documented and communicated. There remain significant opportunities for research to contribute to this area. This conference will bring together experts and constituents from transportation, urban planning, public health, health care, and health economics to explore the states of the art and practice on quantifying the public health outcomes of active transportation.

Focus areas of the conference include:

- Scientific evidence on relationships between active transportation and health.

- Strategies for data collection and methods of data analysis and modeling that contribute to the quantification of impacts on personal, household, and community health as they relate to various aspects of active travel, such as usage, exposure to risks, or quality of pedestrian and bicycle facilities.

- Innovative tools and approaches to assess the impacts of active transportation (e.g. health impact assessments of transportation projects or local, regional, and state planning scenarios), as well as tools to better forecast the effects of project or plan alternatives on active transportation."

The conference will be organized around thematic sessions. We are looking for presentations that fit into one or more of the following themes:

1. Comprehensive conceptual frameworks, studies and models that integrate the numerous domains by which active transportation relates to health; 2. Scientific evidence on relationships between measures of active travel and health—especially studies that assess both benefits and risks of active travel; 3. Health impact assessments (HIAs) in transportation planning, including practical applications of HIAs that pertain to impacts of walking, cycling, and public health in transportation planning; 4. Monetization and economic valuation of health impacts; 5. Examples and experiences of collecting and using bicycle and pedestrian data in active transportation planning applications and the development and use of tools suited for the assessment of health impacts (e.g. regional travel demand modeling, sketch planning tools, GIS, etc.); 6. Assessing health impacts of walking and cycling related to public transport; 7. Methodological issues of assessment of health impacts of active travel (e.g. substitution of physical activity from transport and other domains; interaction with demographics and other factors; self‐selection; and issues with data collection).