Analyzing the impact of neighborhood safety on active school travels

Abstract

Childhood obesity has become a serious public health challenge during the past few decades, calling for policies to incorporate physical activity into students’ routines. This study is an effort to contribute to the current literature of school travels by analyzing how improving safety of different neighborhoods in Chicago, Illinois would encourage students toward shifting to active modes, and how this interrelationship is affected by the severe weather conditions during the cold winters of the region. The results are complemented by multiple sensitivity analyses to quantify how these shifts would help different students burn extra walking calories (i.e. the extra calories each student burns due to walking more). We estimate multiple discrete continuous extreme value models to understand how flexible a student is in combining his/her most preferred transportation mode with other choices. Various sources of inter-personal heterogeneity are also captured by using a latent-classification framework as well as differentiating the before-school from after-school trip chains to consider the behavioral distinction, explicitly. Several explanatory variables are incorporated into the models, including socio-demographics of students and their household, land-use, crime prevalence, and seasonal/weather conditions. Per the results, improving safety of Chicago from its current condition to the national median, would encourage students to be up to 40% more active. This extra active travel demand would provide obese students aged 14–18 with 18% of the calorie burn they need to lose weight to the obesity cutoff and 13% of the calorie burn required for losing weight from the obesity cutoff to overweight.