Effects of walking on self-assessed health status: Links between walking, trip purposes and health

Introduction: Positive effects of walking on health has led to a growing number of studies in public health and transportation planning fields. These studies reveal the associations between socio-economic factors, built environment, and health outcomes. However, the effects of walking for various trip purposes on health have often been glossed over. We explore the effects of various trip purposes on individuals' self-assessed health status with a focus on walking trips. Methods: This study relies on a nationwide dataset from the US, the 2017 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) data. The sample includes 125,885 adults between the ages of 18 and 64. The analyses are based on an ordered logit model that relates our variables of interest to self-assessed health status. The trip purposes are defined as: home-based work, home-based shop-ping, home-based recreation, home-based other and non-home-based trips. Results: First, this study shows that walking for different trip purposes has different effects on adults' self-assessed health scores. For instance, an additional 10-min of walking for home-based work trips increases the odds of being in a higher health outcome category by 6 percent, while this effect is smaller for home-based other trips (3 percent). Second, further examination reveals that walking for different trip purposes has distinct walking speeds and durations. Walking for home-based work trips has the fastest speeds (2.69 miles/hour), followed by walking for home-based recreational trips (2.55 miles/hour). These suggest different trip purposes may have distinct metabolic equivalents (MET) for energy expenditure estimation purposes. Conclusions: This study shows that the benefits of walking on health mainly come from home-based walking trips. Planners and decision makers should consider diverse interventions to encourage people to walk within, to and from their neighborhoods. This study also provides a basis for using trip purpose variables as proxies for walking speeds and durations.