Maintaining health in daily life—is active travel the solution?

Abstract

Physical inactivity is a global public health challenge. At the same time, the societal transformation toward a sustainable and active lifestyle can be observed. Active travel (AT) is one physical activity (PA) domain and combines healthy and sustainable daily behavior. However, it is still unclear whether assumed associations between AT and health are resilient for objective and subjective health outcomes. Since published research on AT has been growing during the last decade, this scoping review aimed to update and summarize the existing evidence. Therefore, a scoping review was conducted in PubMed, Web of Science, ScienceDirect, and Cochrane Library, following PRISMA guidelines. In all, 35 papers including 4,857,918 individuals (age range: 18–93 years old) were included. AT is strongly associated with health dimensions with a great body of knowledge showing strong associations between AT and reduced risks for noncommunicable diseases (NCD), especially in comparison to non-AT. Thus, AT can play an important role to prevent the increasing prevalence of NCD. There is a limited amount of research available on health-promoting factors and subjective health. Extracted studies suggest positive connections with AT. Mostly, cycling as a form of AT seems to have a more significant positive association with health compared to walking. Longitudinal studies further support and reinforce these findings.