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.
Highlights
Over the past decade, several studies have examined how the built environment relates to children’s school travel patterns (McMillan 2007; Faulkner et al 2009; Panter et al 2011; Larsen, Gilliland, and Hess 2012)
The median household income of the respondents home dissemination area (DA) was $72,932 and there was a median of one vehicle per licensed driver within the sample
The results of this study suggest that the statistical validity of models that include environmental correlates of school travel mode depends on the approach taken and assumptions underlying first the conceptualization of, and the measurement of, the “environment.” Overall, there were more significant variables in the shortest-path analysis and model fit was better than in the mapped route models, but this does not mean that shortest-path analysis is a better method to examine the built environment
Summary
Several studies have examined how the built environment relates to children’s school travel patterns (McMillan 2007; Faulkner et al 2009; Panter et al 2011; Larsen, Gilliland, and Hess 2012). That research was largely motivated by the precipitous decline in children’s physical activity that has taken place in much of the Global North during the post World War II era. Only 7 percent of Canadian children ages 5 to 11 and 4 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds are active enough to meet the national physical activity guidelines (Active Healthy Kids Canada 2013). The Journal of Transport and Land Use is the official journal of the World Society for Transport and Land Use (WSTLUR) and is published and sponsored by the University of Minnesota Center for Transportation Studies. This paper is published with sponsorship from WSTLUR and the Institutes of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis, and the University of California, Berkeley. Establishing physical activity at a young age is important; physically active children are more likely to remain active throughout their lives (Telama et al 2005; Conroy et al 2005)
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