Home-school Travel: Analysis of Factors Affecting Italian Parents' Mode Choice

Abstract

Pedestrian injury is a major hazard to the health of children in most developed countries. Pedestrian accidents are one of the first causes of injury-related deaths and hospitalizations among children aged 5 to 14 in industrialized countries. This study has a dual objective: 1) to identify the factors affecting Italian parents' propensity to use private cars to accompany their children to school; 2) to analyze the availability of Italian parents to let their children walk to school alone. In order to develop this analysis, the data collected from a survey conducted in front of 9 schools (kindergartens and primary schools) in Catania were used. A path analysis was carried out to analyze these data. The results show that the habit of driving children to school is still very common in Italy. Main reasons why parents drive their children to school are the lack of safe home-school paths and the availability of regular or irregular parking spaces near the school. These results can be useful for those involved in transport planning and safety in order to implement effective actions aimed at encouraging the use of one or several human-powered modes of transportation such as walking or cycling. The results furthermore suggest that infrastructure-centered interventions, such as traffic calming measures and safer pedestrian crossings, can increase parents' safety perception of the home-school paths and thus raise the probability that children walk to school.

Comparative Analyses of Parameters Influencing Children Pedestrian Behavior in Conflict Zones of Urban Intersections

“…The study also reinforced an already established fact that Italian children gain independent mobility during school years to a smaller extent than children in the rest of Europe, in this case Croatia [5,6]. While in Rijeka and Osijek respectively 6% and 11% of children were supervised by an adult while crossing the street, in Enna the percentage of supervised children was 55%.…”

“…In addition, most at risk of traffic accidents are boys aged from 11 to 14 years. In Italy, many children are accompanied by their parents on daily travel to and from school [5]. On average only one third of children go to school without adult company when the walking distance is up to 1 km-precisely 33.2% of children up to 14 years of age.…”

Physiological and driving behaviour changes associated to different road intersections

“…), cause significant reductions of speeds, of accidents and of the severity of the accidents themselves (Fernandes et al, 2018, Nicholson et al, 2014. Recent studies also confirmed that the effectiveness of traffic calming measures can also induce transport mode choices alternative to motor vehicles, favouring sustainable transport modes such as cycling and walking (Gössling et al, 2019, Distefano et al, 2019c, Vasudevan and Patel, 2017, Nicholson et al, 2014.…”

Design-Build Approaches with Building's Users in Local School Case Study in Cairo, Egypt

“…Main purpose of this stage: establish a long term post-participatory strategy observation and data gathering system [7] to evaluate users' engagement and satisfaction with results for a long term duration.…”