School travel route measurement and built environment effects in models of children’s school travel behavior

Abstract

Abstract:The most common form of physical activity for people of all ages is walking, thus the use of active travel modes, such as walking or cycling for school trips, can increase daily physical activity levels. School travel is one way to encourage walking and cycling on a daily basis. Much of the recent literature reports inconsistent results pertaining to how the built environment may relate to active school travel. To date, there is no consistent approach toward conceptualizing the "environment" for its measurement, and this may be partially to blame for the inconsistent results. The purpose of this paper is twofold: to examine how characteristics of the built environment might relate to mode of school travel, while testing how measurement of the environment may influence the results in terms of the shortest path or respondent reported route mapping. The results indicate that model parameter estimates vary when using these two route measurement methods. Differences in the conceptualization and measurement of the school travel environment could carry forward into misguided planning or policy interventions targeting environmental features that may actually have no influence on school travel decisions.

Exploring the Objective and Perceived Environmental Attributes of Older Adults’ Neighborhood Walking Routes: A Mixed Methods Analysis

“…Positive perceptions of aesthetics were found to be associated with greater amounts of greenery en route. These associations add to an extensive body of literature concerning the potential impact of greenery on perceptions of the environment (e.g., Van den Berg, Koole, & van der Wulp, 2003; White & Gatersleben, 2011), walking (e.g., Larsen, Buliung, & Faulkner, 2016; Larsen, Gilliland, & Hess, 2012; Sugiyama, Thompson, & Alves, 2009), and health outcomes (e.g., Sugiyama et al, 2009; Takano, Nakamura, & Watanabe, 2002; Ulrich et al, 1991). …”

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.…”

“…More specifically, these papers focus on the potential influence of the neighborhood built environment on active mobility in childhood. Some of these papers emphasize measurement issues, particularly with regard to travel routes (Larsen et al 2016) and neighborhood characteristics (Sarjala et al 2016), to improve our understanding of the geography of children's mobility. Others highlight the importance of distinguishing between travel modes when exploring school travel or other aspects of childhood mobility and point out that a "walkable" neighborhood may not always be "bikeable" (Moran et al 2016).…”

Investigating the impact of GIS modelled daily exposures to the retail food environment on routinely linked child health data

“…Home postcode centroids were obtained from Ordnance Survey's Code Point [361] and address level school locations were used from Ordnance Survey's AddressBase Premium [362]. 78 The participants were given paper maps that included their home and school locations [348]. The shortest network routes were included on the map in order to guide the pupils and act as an aid.…”