Abstract
Transport to school can contribute significantly to adolescents’ physical activity but in New Zealand – as in many other countries around the world – many adolescents are driven to school. Public transport offers an opportunity to integrate incidental active transport into school commutes. In this paper, we bring together multiple sources of data into a multi-method study to elucidate the barriers to and facilitators of public transport use by adolescents for school travel in Dunedin, New Zealand, a city with low rates of public transport use. The data include a public bus survey from Otago School Students Lifestyle Survey (OSSLS, 1391 adolescents); the Built Environment Active Transport to School (BEATS) Study parental survey (350 parents), focus groups (54 adolescents, 25 parents, 12 teachers) and semi-structured interviews (12 principals); interviews with three policy-makers from local/regional/national agencies; and analysis of 10 relevant local/regional/national strategies/transport plans. The findings show how distance to school, cost, parental trip chaining, built environment features, the weather, convenience, and safety perceptions are major barriers to using public transport to school. Moreover, current transport planning documents do not favour public health. A number of recommendations that could increase public transport use are made including: raising parking prices to discourage parents driving and trip-chaining; improving bus infrastructure and services; providing subsidies; and changing perceptions of public transport use and users. These actions, however, require collaboration between government authorities across the local, regional and national scale.
Highlights
Travel can provide access to employment and education, as well as opportunities for physical activity and social engagement (Mindell et al, 2011)
Dunedin is a coastal city with a territorial land area of 3,314.8 km2 and city-proper of 255 km2
A bus network provides Dunedin’s public transport system; this was used for only 1% of all trips in 2012–2014 (Early et al, 2015)
Summary
Travel can provide access to employment and education, as well as opportunities for physical activity and social engagement (Mindell et al, 2011). How people travel affects both their own health and that of others (Cohen et al, 2014). Many factors affect travel mode choice, including perceptions of transport modes (e.g. perceptions of public transport in car-dominated societies (Murray et al, 2010)); political frameworks and environment; funding regimes; and the built and nat ural environment. New Zealand had the third highest adult obesity prevalence among OECD countries in 2017, while 36% of 10–14 year olds were overweight or obese in 2016/ 2017 (Ministry of Health, 2017).
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