Transport for Health: The Global Burden of Disease From Motorized Road Transport

Rapid improvements in road transport have helped many nations make progress toward their development goals. Transport is often one of the most highly funded sectors in development bank lending portfolios due to ongoing demand from borrowers as well as its role in stimulating economic growth and competitiveness. At the same time, the global development community is increasingly concerned about the social costs of growth in road transport, particularly the impacts on human health due to the rise in road traffic injuries and impacts on non-communicable diseases via emissions and decreased physical activity.
This report quantifies, for the first time, the global health loss from injuries and air pollution that can be attributed to motorized road transport. It combines estimates of the global burden of road injuries based on a large pool of new data from the most information-poor regions with estimates of the health effects of pollution from vehicles.