Transport and Children's Wellbeing by E. Owen D. Waygood Margareta Friman Lars E. Olsson Raktim Mitra (review)

Abstract

Book Review: Transport and Children’s Wellbeing 199 Transport and Children’s Wellbeing E. Owen D. Waygood, Margareta Friman, Lars E. Olsson, and Raktim Mitra, editors (2019) Amsterdam: Elsevier, 396 pages $125.00 (paperback or e-book); ISBN: 978-0-12-814694-1 Transport and Children’s Wellbeing came out in late 2019, just before the worldwide coronavirus pandemic upended the lives of people everywhere, stopping travel, sending work and school online, and shuttering community gathering places. Reading the 19-chapter edited volume a year after its publication, in the context of a transformed global transportation landscape, one can perhaps more fully appreciate the depth and value of the editors’ intentions to offer academic researchers, graduate students, city leaders, and policymakers a new way of conceptualizing the role and impact of transport on the everyday lives of young people. The book is well timed to inspire thinking about how to “build back better” with more resilient, equitable, and child-friendly policies and practices (OECD, 2020). Building on the findings of an integrative literature review published in 2017 (Waygood et al., 2017), Waygood, Friman, Olsson, and Mitra construct a strong armature of theory for their book, providing a structure that allows for a unique synthesis of knowledge across a variety of literatures and disciplines. The editors themselves exemplify cross-disciplinary and international collaboration: Owen Waygood is a transportation engineer who has studied and worked in Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Sweden; Margareta Friman and Lars Olsson are Swedish professors of psychology who specialize in transportation dynamics; and Raktim Mitra is an urban planner originally from Bangladesh, now based in Canada. Each contributes to chapters throughout the book, alongside contributions from researchers and practitioners in public health, geography, sociology, education, and the design professions. The book is organized around a conceptual framework that posits three “means of influence” by which transport affects five domains of children’s wellbeing: access (the ability to get to different places), intrinsic influences (those encountered during transport), and extrinsic influences (those resulting from others’ transport behavior) potentially impact children’s physical, psychological, social, cognitive, and economic wellbeing, as initially defined by Pollard and Lee (2003). Each of the chapters in the book engage this conceptual framework, homing in on specific interactions or impacts. The chapters are loosely organized into three themes: 1) relationships between children’s travel behavior and their wellbeing, 2) key externalities or risk factors of transportation that affect children’s wellbeing, and 3) approaches to improving the contexts and conditions of children’s travel in terms of the socioecological framework originally developed by Bronfenbrenner (1989). For researchers and policymakers concerned with young people, families, and transportation, Transport and Children’s Wellbeing provides an excellent synthesis Book Review: Transport and Children’s Wellbeing 200 of research conducted over the past several decades. Contributors draw from a wide range of both classic and contemporary studies, methodological approaches, and findings from practice, pointing to a way forward with wellbeing at the center. There is widespread consensus among the book’s contributors that systems-level analysis and policymaking to address the complexity of the contexts of children’s transport is needed, and that local adaptation of international policy frameworks such as Vision Zero and the UNICEF Child Friendly Cities approach can help guide innovation focused on the needs and capabilities of young people. Most of the book’s chapters are literature reviews that address specific aspects of the editors’ conceptual framework. This leads to a certain amount of redundancy, as some themes—the physical health benefits of walking and bicycling, for example—are more common in the literature than others, such as the connections between children’s travel and the economic aspect of wellbeing. The chapter that addresses the latter domain—chapter 10, by Noreen McDonald, W. Mathew Palmer, and Ruth Steiner—is one of the most compelling and concise contributions in the book. The authors bridge the gap between the health benefits of active travel to school and the economic benefits of investing in infrastructure and supports that facilitate it, including reduced pedestrian injuries and school transportation costs. They point to the need for more research in this area, noting that little is yet known about...