Recent research suggests that, besides traditional sociodemographic and built environment attributes, the attitudes and perceptions of parents toward walking and bicycling play a crucial role in deciding which travel modes children take to school. However, little is known about the factors that shape these parental attitudes. The current study aims to investigate this unexplored avenue of research and to identify the influences on parental attitudes toward children walking and bicycling to school as part of a larger nationwide effort to make children more physically active and combat rising trends of childhood obesity in the United States. Through the use of a multivariate ordered response model (a model structure that allows different attitudes to be correlated), the current study analyzes five parental attitudes toward children walking and bicycling to school on the basis of data drawn from the California add-on sample of the 2009 National Household Travel Survey. In particular, the subsample from the Los Angeles–Riverside–Orange County area is used in this study to take advantage of a rich set of microaccessibility measures that are available for this region. It is found that school accessibility, work patterns, current mode use in the household, and sociodemographic characteristics shape parental attitudes toward children walking and bicycling to school. The study findings provide insights on policies, strategies, and campaigns that may help shift parental attitudes to be more favorable toward children walking and bicycling to school.
Despite the various benefits of using metakaolin as a supplementary cementitious material (SCM), the high price of metakaolin limits its use in concrete to premium applications. However there are other sedimentary minerals, such as calcined shale, that may be able to fill the need for low cost, abundant SCMs in concrete construction. The study presented here investigated a low cost calcined shale, sourced from a lightweight aggregate producer, and compared its performance as an SCM to that of a commercially available metakaolin. The effect of both SCMs on compressive strength, resistance to alkali silica reaction and mixture workability were evaluated. Results show that, other than early age compressive strength, the performance of calcined shale in cementitious mixtures is comparable to that of metakaolin. Differences in behavior of the SCMs are discussed in the context of their chemical and physical properties.
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