Past and Present of Active School Transportation: An Exploration of the Built Environment Effects in Toronto, Canada from 1986 to 2006

Abstract

Abstract:The health benefits of walking and cycling to and from school, also called active school transportation (AST), are well documented. In the context of a declining trend in AST across the Western world, this paper examines school-travel behavior of 11-year-old children in Toronto, using multiple cross-sectional data from 1986, 1996, and 2006 Transportation Tomorrow Surveys. Results from binomial logit models suggest that school-travel distance and neighborhood built environment indeed explain some variation in the odds of AST between 1986 and 2006, and that the correlates of AST may have changed over time. Higher neighborhood block density correlated with walking/cycling in 1986. In contrast, household automobile ownership was negatively associated with AST in 2006; the effect of the built environment was relatively weak for that year. In addition, fewer children walked/cycled in 2006 compared to 1986, even when distance to school was short (<0.8 kilometers). Policy and programs should recognize the potentially changing role of travel distance to school and automobile ownership on a child's school travel outcome. Interventions in neighborhoods with high automobile ownership should specifically focus on education and encouragement to increase AST rates.

Healthy movement behaviours in children and youth during the COVID-19 pandemic: Exploring the role of the neighbourhood environment

“…The social-ecological models of health behaviour emphasize the importance of the social and environmental contexts within which healthy behaviours may thrive ( Mitra and Manaugh, 2020 ; Rhodes et al, 2019 ; Sallis et al, 2008 ). Using this theoretical approach, empirical research over the past two decades has explored how a child's socio-demographic characteristics, economic conditions and the neighbourhood built environment may relate to various healthy movement behaviours, including active transportation (walking/cycling) ( Larouche et al, 2014 ; Mitra et al, 2016 ), independent mobility ( Mitra et al, 2014 ; Riazi and Faulkner, 2019 ), outdoor play ( Faulkner et al, 2015 ; Lambert et al, 2019 ) and sleep ( Grander, 2019 ). A detailed discussion of this literature is beyond the scope of this study, but broadly, proximity to destinations (e.g., school, parks) and perception of child safety (e.g., traffic danger, stranger danger) are frequently reported as major barriers to a child or youth's outdoor physical activity participation ( Waygood et al, 2020 ).…”

Children's school commuting in the Netherlands: Does it matter how urban form is incorporated in mode choice models?

“…Though useful for hypotheses generation, the research design is cross-sectional (Lu et al, 2014;Fishman et al, 2015). We recommend that future studies be longitudinal and consider changes of the covariates over time (Mitra et al, 2016). Parent's attitudes toward their residential location choice were not available and self-selection cannot be ruled out (Mokhtarian & Cao, 2008).…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, it is the first comparative study of these three urban form utilizations and how they affect model interpretation. While several Anglophone studies have been published (e.g., Kerr et al, 2006;McMillan, 2007;Noland, Park, Von Hagen, & Chatman, 2014;Oliver et al, 2014;Mitra, Papaioannou, & Habib, 2016;Woldeamanuel, 2016), European studies (e.g., M€ uller et al, 2008;Broberg & Sarjala, 2015;Kaplan et al, 2016) are underrepresented (Lu et al, 2014). We focused on the Netherlands, a country that is highly attuned to walking and cycling (Pucher & Buehler, 2008).…”

Introduction: Transport and land use in childhood

“…In this issue, the relationship between income and children's transport and land use is directly addressed in the papers by Larsen et al (2016), Mitra et al (2016), McDonald et al (2016), and Sarjala et al (2016). Arguably, there is more work to be done to understand what is happening at the intersection between poverty, land use, transportation, and childhood.…”

“…Looking across North America and parts of Europe, what we have seen is a steady decline in active school transportation (more specifically, walking and cycling) since the end of World War II (Buliung et al 2009;McDonald et al 2011;Pooley et al 2005). Four of the five papers included in this issue address this problem by examining walking and cycling for school transportation, using case studies from Toronto, Canada (Larsen et al 2016;Mitra et al,2016), Rishon LeZion, Israel (Moran et al 2016), and Helsinki, Finland (Sarjala et al 2016). More specifically, these papers focus on the potential influence of the neighborhood built environment on active mobility in childhood.…”