The study was conducted by scientists at Brown University and draws on work first developed at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n The researchers looked at mental health hospital visits across New York City ZIP codes and compared them with a measure of how isolated communities were by road design, traffic, and weak pedestrian infrastructure.<\/p>\n More than a pollution problem<\/p>\n A lot of earlier research has already linked traffic-related pollution<\/a> and noise to worse mental health. But this study looked at something a little different.<\/p>\n Instead of focusing only on what comes out of vehicles, the researchers asked what happens when roads themselves break neighborhoods apart.\u00a0<\/p>\n What happens when highways, busy streets, and unsafe crossings make it harder for people to walk to a neighbor\u2019s house, linger outside, or feel connected to the place where they live?<\/p>\n That question gets at something people often feel without having a clear way to describe it. Two neighborhoods can sit close together on a map and still feel worlds apart if one is easy to walk through and the other is carved up by traffic.<\/p>\n \u201cImagine an environment where cars are present, but do not dominate, and that also has robust pedestrian traffic and walkable routes to neighbors\u2019 homes, and where you can see kids playing outside and neighbors congregating to talk,\u201d said Jaime Benavides, an expert in the Brown University School of Public Health<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe wanted to home in on the road infrastructure that prevents people from interacting and learn how that influences their mental health<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Disconnection in cutoff neighborhoods <\/p>\n The team used annual New York State Department of Health counts of hospital visits related to mood, anxiety, adjustment, and schizophrenia disorders.<\/p>\n They then compared those figures with something called the Community Severance Index. <\/p>\n This measure was designed to capture how much a neighborhood is physically and socially cut off by roads, traffic, and the lack of things like sidewalks and crosswalks.\u00a0<\/p>\n The index was developed under the leadership of study co-leader Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou, now a professor of epidemiology and environment and society affiliated with Brown\u2019s Center for Climate, Environment and Health.<\/p>\n That matters because it shifts attention from a familiar issue, traffic as pollution, to something less obvious but potentially just as important: traffic as a barrier between people.<\/p>\n A road can connect cities and still divide a neighborhood. A street can move thousands of cars and still make ordinary local life harder.<\/p>\n Community isolation and schizophrenia<\/p>\n Urban living has long been associated with higher risks of anxiety<\/a>, mood disorders, and schizophrenia. But in this study, one finding stood out more than the others.<\/p>\n The clearest relationship was between community isolation and schizophrenia-related hospital visits.\u00a0<\/p>\n Areas that were more cut off by roads and traffic patterns tended to have more of those visits, and that pattern remained even when the researchers accounted for air pollution from traffic.<\/p>\n That point is important. It suggests the problem is not only the pollution cars produce. It may also be the way car-centered design changes everyday social life.<\/p>\n The effect also looked similar across age groups, which hints that this is not limited to one narrow slice of the population.<\/p>\n The study did not claim to explain exactly why this happens. But it does point to several likely pathways.<\/p>\n Problems due to road infrastructure<\/p>\n A neighborhood that is hemmed in by busy roads or broken pedestrian routes is harder to move through. <\/p>\n That can mean fewer casual interactions, less walking, less time outside, and fewer chances to build the kind of loose social ties<\/a> that quietly make life feel more stable.<\/p>\n It can also mean more stress. Crossing dangerous roads, dealing with noise, feeling boxed in, or struggling to reach goods and services all wear on daily life.\u00a0<\/p>\n Over time, that kind of environment may shape mental wellbeing in ways that are easy to miss if people only look at pollution levels.<\/p>\n The researchers note that mental health might be affected through several routes, one of the most important ones being isolation.\u00a0<\/p>\n Isolation<\/a> may discourage physical activity, may raise stress through road safety fears, and it may reduce contact between residents who might otherwise form supportive, familiar, everyday connections.<\/p>\n That picture feels recognizable even beyond this specific study. People tend to feel better in places where they can walk, meet others, and move without feeling under siege from traffic.<\/p>\n Cars are not the whole answer<\/p>\n One of the more interesting parts of the study is what it suggests about solutions.<\/p>\n For years, one major response to traffic-related harm has been the push toward electric vehicles<\/a>. But these new findings suggest that electrifying the vehicle fleet may not solve everything.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have increasing evidence that air pollution impacts mental health,\u201d Kioumourtzoglou said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the solutions proposed is to move towards an electrified vehicle fleet. While this will result in reduced emissions, which is absolutely fantastic, what our study shows is that might not be enough.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe need to move away from car dependence and towards building healthier places and communities that bring people together instead of isolating them.\u201d<\/p>\n That is a bigger challenge, because it is not just about what kind of cars people drive. It is about how cities are built.<\/p>\n Planning for connection<\/p>\n \u201cWhile scientists are still researching the causes, prevention, and treatment of mental illness and mood disorders, urban environmental exposures \u2013 specifically, traffic patterns and road infrastructure \u2013 are things that can be addressed from an urban planning perspective,\u201d Benavides said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cReducing vehicular traffic, creating more easily accessible parks and limiting highways and roads that cut through the middle of communities can improve collective mental wellbeing.\u201d<\/p>\n The researchers now want to take the work further. They are developing a version of their community isolation measure that could be used in other major U.S. cities.\u00a0<\/p>\n They are also working on a new study looking at how extreme heat, air pollution, and community isolation may combine to affect the mental health of older adults.<\/p>\n For now, this study leaves behind a simple but powerful idea. A city can harm people not only through what it exposes them to, but also through what it keeps them from reaching.<\/p>\n The study is published in the journal Environmental Epidemiology<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter<\/a> for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.<\/p>\n Check us out on EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls<\/a> and Earth.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"City traffic does more than fill the air with pollution and noise. A new study suggests the way…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":636885,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[49,48,84,393,394],"class_list":["post-636884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-health","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=636884"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636884\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/636885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=636884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=636884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=636884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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