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Cycling and wellbeing
Does cycling increase well-being
Update 2014-12-15
I contacted one of the researchers behind the work the headline on well-being and cycling was based on and Dr. Martin gave me the link to the scientific paper that is free to access:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0091743514003144
In response to my questions he stated 'You will see that the study provides longitudinal evidence of an improvement in well-being when people switch from cars to active travel or to public transport. While this particular study does not explore how to encourage people to make the switch, it demonstrates that there could be an improvement in population-level well-being if more people used these more active travel modes'.
I feel after reading the paper the claims are well supported, and it is interesting to see that alongside an increase in well-being when changing to walking or cycling, there was also an increase when changing to public transport which was highlighted to a lesser extent in the news article.The study also highlights that this trend is to be considered locally for the data used and in other countries there may be different associations with the form of transport and well-being.