Transportation Planning Impacts Sleep

There are many important parts of the intersection between public health and planning but one I haven’t seen discussed much is sleep. People have all kinds of different sleeping patterns but society generally caters to the early birds over the night owls. I’m not bitter.

Scientists in Japan now have found a way sleep is impacted by housing and transportation choices. Researchers found that length of commutes and housing size can determine whether people have insomnia, which can lead to a whole host of other health problems. But the smaller housing sizes can be somewhat offset with reduced commute times in the Tokyo study area.

I find this interesting for a couple of reasons if it were also loosely applied to the US context. First of which is that we continue to build our housing and transportation systems here so that people are able to afford a bigger, likely quieter, home on the periphery. But the benefits of that are often offset by transportation costs and distances. More time spent in a vehicle commuting can be seen as unhealthy for many reasons including induced stress, but it also seems to offset the sleep benefits of the potentially quieter house.

The second reason this is interesting, especially when thinking in the context of Architectural Epidemiology and green building design which we just discussed on the podcast, is that we just really don’t think hard enough about health in the context of the early decisions that we make in transportation and housing. When we want to address the problems many times it’s too late and we have to resort to the biomedical model of curing ailments.

We know now about all these impacts to people but they are really just tossed to the side to be figure out by someone else. But when we do begin to address them, we get huge results! Look at Santiago Chile, and the 30 year program for cleaning up air quality from particulates. Less respiratory viruses. The health care system isn’t overwhelmed in winter.

But back to the sleep discussion. Many nights when my daughter doesn’t want to go to sleep I tell her that it’s really important. When she asks “why?” as she inevitably does, I always answer that it’s the time when our bodies repair themselves. This repair time ultimately benefits our overall health so perhaps we’d benefit if our planning systems aided existing evolutionary systems honed over hundreds of thousands of years.