The journey to school has major significance both for families and urban environments, yet little is known in detail about the ways this has changed over the twentieth century. This study uses oral history evidence to compare decisions about the journey to school in the past and the present, and to assess the impact of these changes on the mobility experience of children. The paper argues that despite obvious increases in car use, and decreases in children travelling alone, other characteristics of the journey to school in British urban areas have changed little over the past 60 years.
In this paper the authors reappraise the ways in which travellers in urban areas have interacted with new transport technologies and argue that mobility change over the past century or so may be less than is sometimes assumed. Attention is focused on changes in the journey to work over the 20th century, on the experience of new travel technologies by an adolescent female in the late 19th century, on perceptions of competing forms of urban transport in Manchester and Glasgow in the interwar period, and on changes in the everyday mobility of children aged 10^11 years since the 1940s. It is argued that, although the material experience of everyday transport has changed significantly over the past century with the advent of new transport technologies, these did not necessarily change the aspirations and decisions of people with regard to everyday mobility. Moreover, such changes did not always bring benefits to all travellers.
The paper uses original quantitative and qualitative evidence to examine changes in the distance travelled and time spent on the journey to work in twentiethcentury Britain. Emphasis is placed on variations by gender and location, and on the implications of modal change. We suggest that analysis of past commuting trends may have implications for contemporary transport policy.
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