opinion

Opinion | Nashville's transit plan will improve our health

Operating on a heart — opening the chest cavity, sawing through the breastbone, placing the patient on heart-lung bypass, and finally cutting into the body’s most vital muscle — is always the last resort.

As heart surgeons, we tell our patients they can avoid such drastic surgery by acting to prevent heart disease.

If Nashville’s roadways were my patient’s arteries, I'd tell her there are still preventive steps to take — but we need to act now. The alternative is to die of a heart attack or at best need painful surgery later.

Investing in a transit plan today is our preventive medicine. But if we vote down the transit plan on May 1, we are headed for total gridlock — the equivalent of a heart attack — and we will never be quite the same.

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But the health analogy isn’t just metaphorical. What has been largely left out of the public debate on the transit plan is the meaningful impact that public transit has on our citizens’ health and well-being.

Residents of communities with high-quality public transit enjoy numerous health benefits, including cleaner air, reduced traffic-related casualties, and improved physical and mental health.

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Passing and building a comprehensive transit plan will:

Improve air quality so Nashvillians can breathe easier and reduce respiratory illness. Motor vehicle traffic in Davidson County creates 85 percent of our smog and 37 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions, both of which increase the amount of harmful chemicals citizens inhale. By switching to an all-electric bus fleet and adding five light rail corridors, it’s estimated the transit improvement plan will reduce vehicles on the road by an average of 188,000 vehicle miles traveled per weekday. Once fully implemented, the resulting reduction in car emissions will reduce incidence of asthma and lung disease and improve our air quality at a rate equal to planting one million mature trees in our city. Reduce commuter injuries and fatalities. Well planned transit is safer for you. Transit passengers have less than one-10th the casualty rate of car occupants. Improve our city’s health by increasing physical activity. Studies have shown that individuals who use public transit walk more and have lower levels of obesity compared to non-riders. In fact, rail commuters walk an average of 30 percent more steps a day and are four times more likely to walk 10,000 steps during a day than car commuters. Better our mental health through reduced stress and increased access. High-quality public transit reduces emotional stress by improving people’s daily access to education and employment activities, strengthening community cohesion and increasing neighborhood walkability — which is linked to reduced symptoms of depression. Improve the social equity of our neighborhoods. A comprehensive transit plan helps close the extreme health equity gap that plagues Nashville, particularly among low-income families and seniors. And it partly explains why our population’s health is poor compared to similar cities.

In our community meetings at NashvilleHealth, we are repeatedly told that lack of transportation is one of the top barriers to accessing medical services and healthy foods.

Nashvillians are more likely to skip a doctor’s appointment if it requires spending half a day shuttling between multiple buses.

Our current bus system also makes a trip to the grocery store across town to buy fresh produce cumbersome, so many in lower-income neighborhoods continue to settle for the local convenience store that stocks only unhealthy, sugary, processed foods.

Building comprehensive public transit is one of the most equitable and cost-effective ways to improve our population’s health.

Passing the Transit Improvement Plan on May 1 will not only keep the economic engine of our city strong, it will keep our city’s arteries healthy and clear for many years to come.

Bill Frist, M.D., is a nationally recognized heart and lung transplant surgeon, former U.S. Senate majority leader, and founder and chairman of NashvilleHealth. Find him on Twitter as @bfrist.