Buses are good for you?
From Stuff, under the headline “Public transport ‘good for your health'”
Waiting for public transport may seem dull, but new research shows daydreaming at the bus stop may be good for your mental health.
Wouldn’t it be nice to think so? Unfortunately, what the research actually found is a bit different:
In a survey of 1025 public transport passengers in Wellington and Auckland, 47 per cent said the way they had spent their time had a positive effect on their health and wellbeing, and 48 per cent said there was no effect either way.
That is, people who take the bus say they think taking the bus is ok (well, we would, wouldn’t we): there’s no actual health data or comparisons. You might want to compare this with a large Swedish study that came out last year, which found poorer physical and mental health in people with long commutes, with no real difference between transit and car.
Also, the ‘good for your health’ in the headline is claiming to be a quote, but the quote doesn’t appear in the story.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »