Paper Details

TRB 91st Annual Meeting (January 22-26, 2012)

Event Number:	604
Event Title:	Current Issues in School Transportation Safety
Event Date:	Jan 24 2012 3:45PM- 5:30PM
Event Location:	Marriott, Maryland C
Event Description:
Event Agenda:

Integrating Parental Attitudes in Research on Children’s Active School Commuting: Evidence from a Community School Travel Survey (12-1189)

Current active school travel research emphasizes travel distance and neighborhood walkability as major environmental conditions affecting the occurrences of children walking or biking to school. The impacts of how parental travel attitudes on children’s school travel behavior remain understudied. This paper outlines a conceptual framework that incorporates the relationships of attitudes, environment conditions, and children’s walking or biking to school. The framework recognizes the predictive power that attitudinal factors have for children’s walking or biking to school; it also highlights the moderating effects of parental travel attitudes on the predictive power of some environment conditions. Using data (1197 cases) from a school travel survey conducted in a mid-sized school district in Oregon, this paper reports that parental attitudes toward walking/biking to school and car-use are significant explanatory variables in models predicting occurrence of children walking or biking to school when important environmental variables are controlled for. The analysis also reveals that important built environment variables – school-travel distance and neighborhood walkability – exhibit varying levels of impacts on the probability of children walking or biking to school when parents demonstrate different attitudes toward active school commuting and car-use. The paper discusses implications of the research findings for the challenges facing Safe Route to School Programs, and explores approaches that can make these programs more effective.

Authors
     Yang, Yizhao , University of Oregon
     Markowitz, Ezra , University of Oregon