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Abstract
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Background
Active travel can provide solutions to both public health and transportation sustainability issues. Switching from vehicle trips to active modes can bring traffic and safety gains, easing congestion and creating a safer, more walkable environment. Furthermore, active travel can contribute to reaching medically recommended levels of physical activity. Walking and biking to school can help school-age children achieve recommended daily physical activity levels. Similarly, parents who are physically active, whether through non-motorized utilitarian trips or trips for physical and recreational purposes, can improve their own health while influencing the decisions of their children.
Methods
This study analyzed the topic of children's school travel decisions and parents' non-motorized travel frequency in order to understand the determinants of these two household-level decisions that affect the overall physical activity levels of household members. The 2009 National Household Travel Survey with the add-on sample for Texas was used for the model estimation. A multinomial logit model was estimated for the children's school mode choice, and a Poisson count regression model was estimated for the parents' non-motorized travel frequency (weekly).
Results
Overall, an opportunity appears to be present for increased active school travel among children in Texas. Rates of walking and biking to school were lower in Texas than the national average. Additionally, the lower rate of walking in the morning indicates that there are children able and willing to walk to school who do so only in one direction.
FINDINGS from this research highlight the importance of parental attitudes and characteristics on the school mode choice decision, with notable differences between mothers and fathers. For example, results strongly suggested that mothers' concerns regarding traffic conditions in the neighborhood can discourage children's active mode use. In contrast, fathers' work flexibility seemed to facilitate more non-motorized school travel. Similarly, many factors were important in determining non-motorized trip frequency. A flexible work environment, particularly for the mothers, was observed to increase the overall trip frequency of parents.
Conclusions
Concerns regarding health and physical activity levels have prompted a growing interest in understanding the mode choice decisions. The results from this study corroborate the findings from several earlier studies while also indicating new factors not previously identified. The work done in this study can be extended in several directions. One particularly interesting avenue of future research is to model the two decisions in a joint model to identify the causal direction while accounting for unobserved factors.
Keywords: SR2S |