Parental Attitudes toward Children Walking and Bicycling to School

Abstract

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.

Mode of Commuting TO and FROM School: A Similar or Different Pattern?

“…A similar trend was obtained for Canadian [16], Iranian [17], and North American [18][19][20] young people reporting 8%, 6%, and 4% respectively more walkers on the trip from school than on the trip to school. Moreover, the number of students driven home from school was almost 10% and 6% lower than those driven to school in Canada [16] and North America [18] respectively. Actually, Larsen et al [16] found that almost 60% of students reported that the driver of their vehicle was going somewhere else (besides home) after the drop off.…”

Middle School Students' Perceptions of Safety: A Mixed‐Methods Study

“…In 4 of the 5 models, sex was also a significant predictor: older students, boys, and those who self‐identified as African American, rated the images as safer. The results are consistent with Seraj et al who found that boys and older students are less likely to be concerned about crime and traffic speed.…”

“…Inner city parents have been shown to have more anxiety about the safety of outdoor physical activity . While other studies demonstrate that parents perceive the most serious active travel risks to be road crashes, bullying, and abductions, that parents of boys and older children were less likely to be concerned about crime and traffic speed, and that parents who had “few concerns” were more likely to allow participation in active travel compared with those who had “many concerns.” Over 95% parents in 1 study correctly perceived that younger students were less able to make safe street crossings than older children. The majority, however, also incorrectly perceived the relative risk of pedestrian injury, demonstrating the need for education around perceptions and injury prevention .…”

Joint Model of Residential Relocation Choice and Underlying Causal Factors

“…At the same time, there is a growing body of literature that indicates that the qualitative views and desires (characterized also as lifestyles and attitudes/perceptions) of decision agents are important determinants of choice decisions (see (22,23) for in-depth social psychology expositions of the theoretical and conceptual reasons for the influence of lifestyle and attitudes/perceptions on observed choice behavior; due to space limitations, we are unable to discuss these issues at length in the current paper). Transportation researchers have also started to recognize the importance of lifestyles and attitudes/perceptions in empirical work on activitytravel behavior (see (24)(25)(26) for just a few examples), though there has been relatively little research in including such factors in residential mobility decisions. In this paper, we fill this gap by considering a set of qualitative factors (which we will also refer to as the "primary reasons of residential choices") as explicit determinant variables in household residential relocation decisions.…”