School Commuting and the Impact of Cultural Differences: The Israeli Case

Abstract

This paper's focus is on school commuting and related activity patterns in Israel. This topic of school travel is a relatively neglected area in the transportation literature. It may contribute only little to today's most envisaged transport problems but it generates its own insights which may impact the transport system policy and management. The study presented here incorporates data from the main two cultures in Israel: the Jewish and the Arab population. The basic hypothesis is that cultural aspects-perceptions influence commuting to school and related travel behavior. These cultural perceptions, coupled with other factors such as differences in actual and cognitive distance to school, family size, number of cars and driving licenses per household, and parents working hours may determine the commuting behavior of students /pupils to school. This study, still in progress, aims at understanding and comparing school commuting behavior of Arab and Jewish students in various cities and villages in Israel. It includes students of primary and secondary schools. The data collection was held in different locations in Israel. The methodology includes a questionnaire that was filled by the students in class and a questionnaire filled by the parents at home. It compiled data concerning the school commuting and includes some general information regarding other travel activities. The analyses are performed separately for the two study populations. We will describe the input data used for the comparison and discuss home-to-school commuting distances/time and modal-splits for the Arab and Jewish populations. Among the main results it was found that there are differences in terms of home to school commuting but a striking difference exist in the school to home commuting. This is certainly accounted for differences between the two populations.