Sustainable school commuting – understanding choices and identifying opportunities

Understanding school travel inequities and promoting active travel policies more effectively is an increasingly important issue in the international transport policy agenda. Using the dataset of the 2014 Shenzhen primary and secondary school travel survey, this study empirically revealed the permanent residence permit (hukou) system in the context of China shapes the evident inequities between students from public schools and private schools. Students without a legitimated hukou to local areas suffer from more constraints, longer distances, and more time to access private schools which are excluded from the public sponsorship and have disadvantages in geographical locations. Applying the ordered logistic model, this study specifically investigated the influential factors of school commuting travel mode. Household vehicle ownership and travel features (i.e., chauffeuring and home-school distance) have a much more significant role in school travel mode decisions, which largely surpassed the role individual demographic attributes and the school surrounding built environment play. The implications of this study shed light on making more specific strategies for private schools to mitigate mobility inequity imposed on disadvantaged students.

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“…is finding coincides with Kelly and Fu [34] that travel distance to school is the most significant determinant of school travel choice.…”

Section: Effects Of Student-level Travel Feature Variablessupporting

confidence: 90%

School Travel Inequity between Students from Public and Private Schools in the City of Shenzhen, China

Zhou

Lin

Liao

et al. 2021

Journal of Advanced Transportation

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“…Although the parents can hardly define the exact distance that is ‘too far for walking’, most of them suggested an acceptable maximum of 20 min walking time. This is consistent with the range of 1.6–1.9 km walkable distance as identified by Ermagun et al (2016) based on their econometric analysis of data collected in Iran and a maximum of 2 km from Kelly and Fu (2014) based on GIS and census data of Dublin, Ireland.…”

Section: The Modelsupporting

confidence: 89%

Walking school bus line routing for efficiency, health and walkability: A multi‐objective optimisation approach

Wang

Kang

et al. 2023

Multi Criteria Decision Anal

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Walking School Bus (WSB) has been recognised as an innovative solution to promote walking to school, bringing a wide spectrum of benefits, including: health benefits from the physical exercise, social skills and traffic reduction. To facilitate the success of WSB, one vital element is its route planning, which directly affects the catchment for the service and the realisation of all the potential benefits. Previously, time has been the only factor that has been considered in WSB routing problems. Other important factors including air quality, safety and comfort will also be considered in this paper. Air quality along a WSB route is important to help realise the health benefits of walking. Traffic safety has been the biggest barrier to walking to school and must be addressed in planning a WSB route. Ensuring children have an enjoyable and comfortable experience is vital for the sustainability and success of WSB. A walking network is introduced to enable modelling pedestrian movements in detail, including walking movements on different sides of the road and crossing movements. This approach enables detailed route-based analysis to assess the localised effect of air quality on pollutant dose. We define walkability as a measure of children's needs in safety and comfort, which can also be assessed in detail on each route. We propose a multi-objective optimisation model to generate efficient WSB routes with three objectives representing the potential benefits of WSB: (1) to minimise time; (2) to minimise pollutant dose; and (3) to maximise walkability. We apply our model to a selected school in Bradford in the UK, generating three WSB lines following efficient routes. These lines go through a predetermined sequence of 'WSB Stops', with the final stop as the school. All children within the catchment area will be able to join a WSB within 1-2 min walk from their home to the nearest stop. Our multi-objective WSB route planning model is highly transferable to any selected school in any WSB targeted area. Planners will be able to select a combination of WSB lines to offer, based on the requirement of coverage area and resource availability.

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“…Research show that long distances from home to school and congestion constrain active and/or independent travel (without adult supervision) in favor of the car (Ferdinand et al, 2012 ; Gustat et al, 2014a , b ; Larsen et al, 2015 ). The difference between motorized and non-motorized transportation seems to lie within a limit of 2 km (Kelly and Fu, 2014 ), with parents assessing the suitability of the physical environment before deciding on travel mode (Johansson, 2006 ; Race et al, 2017 ). However, many parents drive their children even though the environment meets walkable requirements (e.g., proximity, the presence of cycle lanes, the location of speed bumps, sidewalk coverage), indicating that additional factors underlie decisions to take the car (Mehdizadeh et al, 2016 ; Mah et al, 2017 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Drives Them to Drive?—Parents' Reasons for Choosing the Car to Take Their Children to School

2017

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Children's school journeys have changed vastly during recent decades: More children are being driven to school in private cars instead of walking and cycling, with many who are entitled to a free school bus service still being driven. Earlier research into travel mode choice has often investigated how urban form impacts upon mode choice regarding school journeys—in particular how urban form hinders or enables the use of the active mode. This paper quantitatively explores parents' stated reasons for choosing the car and the relationship between these reasons and the decision to use the car to take their children to school. We additionally investigate the relationship between sociodemographic factors, distance, and both the stated reasons and the actual mode decision. A sample of 245 parents (194 women) of school children aged 10–15 in the County of Värmland in Sweden were included in the study. The results of PLS-SEM show that the factor Social convenience has a direct relationship with the frequency of car use indicating that the wish to accompany the child and the convenience of car impacts on car choice. If the child is not allowed to travel independently, the parents choose the car to take him/her to school. Sociodemographic factors had a direct relationship with the stated reasons, whereby parents with a higher level of education valued safety/security less. Quite surprisingly, distance (i.e., environmental factor) did not affect car use, indicating that parents drive their children to school regardless of distance. By isolating the particular reasons for choosing the car, this paper focuses on a potentially important missing piece as regards finding out what motivates the increasing car usage in children's school journeys. An increased knowledge of what motivates the decision to take children by car is important for effective policies aimed at changing parents' inclination toward choosing the car.

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Sustainable school commuting – understanding choices and identifying opportunities

Cited by 38 publications

References 34 publications

School Travel Inequity between Students from Public and Private Schools in the City of Shenzhen, China

School Travel Inequity between Students from Public and Private Schools in the City of Shenzhen, China

Walking school bus line routing for efficiency, health and walkability: A multi‐objective optimisation approach

What Drives Them to Drive?—Parents' Reasons for Choosing the Car to Take Their Children to School

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