A35 The relationship between walking and cycling of youth and urban form: a Heckman selection model of active travel mode and

Abstract

Abstract Background Active travel of children and adolescents is a major public health challenge, which when promoted, offers immediate health benefits and forms future sustainable travel habits. Studies show that urban form is essential for encouraging children to use non-motorized modes. Existing studies have five limitations. Firstly, they explored the relationship between urban form and the odds of active travel while neglecting the amount of active travel. Secondly, they focused on exclusively on walking. Thirdly, they were conducted in car-oriented countries. Fourthly, they did not base their analysis on detailed GIS databases. Last, they focused on 9-12 year-olds, which cannot be readily extended to older adolescents because of changes in parental attitudes. Methods We focus on the relationship between children’s mobility and measurable aspects of urban form and overcome the aforementioned limitations. We explore jointly the choice and the extent of active travel of youth while distinctly considering walking and cycling, controlling for urban form measures, and taking both a “street view” looking at the immediate home surroundings and a “bird’s eye view” looking at wider neighbourhoods. A Heckman selection model represents the distance covered while cycling (walking) given the mode choice being bicycle (walk) for a representative sample of 2,336 travel-activity diaries 10-15 year-old children from the Capital Region of Denmark extracted from the Danish national travel survey and combined with GIS sources and the Danish national transport model. Results Higher probability to cycle as active travel mode and longer cycling distances are related to older age of the youth and escorting by the parents, with the latter being the most dominant effect among the socioeconomic characteristics. Higher probability of cycling is positively related to: high density of low-speed roads within 1.5 km from the children’s house, not having a train station with 1 km from home, low intersection density, lower car and heavy vehicle traffic densities, lower crash densities, and low share of immigrants. Conclusions Policy implications are: i) the necessity of different urban environments for walking and cycling, as the former relates to “street view” urban form and the latter also to “bird’s eye view”; ii) the need for measures aiming at traffic reduction and speed calming, diminution of heavy vehicle movements, lessening of cyclist-motorist conflicts at intersections, and decrease of cycling crashes, ii) the need for campaigns addressing social norms in neighbourhoods located outside the city or with higher percentages of immigrants in order to motivate active travel of children.