01587800

Component

Active travel of children and adolescents is a major public health challenge of the modern era but, when promoted and nurtured, offers immediate health benefits and forms future sustainable and healthy travel habits. This study explores jointly the choice and the extent of active travel of youth while considering walking and cycling as distinct travel forms, controlling for objective urban form measures, and taking both a “street view” looking at the immediate home surroundings and a “bird’s eye view” looking at the neighborhood environments. A Heckman selection model represents the distance covered while cycling (walking) given the mode choice being bicycle (walk) for a representative sample of 10-15 year-old children from the Capital Region of Denmark extracted from the Danish National Travel Survey. Results illustrate the necessity of different urban environments for walking and cycling, as the former relates to “street view” urban form measures and the latter also to “bird’s eye view” ones. Results also show the need for measures aiming at traffic reduction and speed calming, diminution of heavy vehicle movements in local streets, lessening of cyclist-motorist conflicts at intersections, and decrease of cycling crash frequency and severity. Last, results indicate that campaigns should address perceptions and social norms in neighborhoods located outside the city or populated with higher percentages of immigrants in order to motivate active travel of children.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ANF20 Standing Committee on Bicycle Transportation. Alternate title: Youth Walking and Cycling: Relationship Between Active Travel and Urban Form

01584066

16-1809

English

18p

2016

Transportation Research Board 95th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

References; Tables

Adolescents; Bicycling; Children; Immigrants; Mode choice; Motivation; Nonmotorized transportation; Travel demand management; Urban areas; Urban design; Walking

Denmark

Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Planning and Forecasting; Society; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2016 Paper #16-1809

PRP, TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 12 2016 4:46PM