01333809

Component

School choice policy allows students the freedom to enroll in schools farther away from their residence than their neighborhood schools. Due to lengthened school trips, this policy is perceived to have negative impacts on active school commuting, defined as children walking or biking to/from school. There has been no systematic research on the school choice policy’s full implications for school transportation, especially for active school commuting. In this paper we discuss the mechanism by which the school choice policy may affect active school commuting. Based on a conceptual model that integrates ecological and cognitive factors in the understanding of school travel behavior, we suggest that implementation of school choice policy may have potential effects on the environmental and attitudinal factors relevant to children walking or biking to school. We use a case study of a middle-sized school district in Oregon to test some of the effects. School choice policy has been implemented in this district for more than 30 years, and parents who sent their children to choice schools have mainly relied on themselves for school transportation. Using a school-district wide GIS data and a survey data, we investigated the degree to which school choice contributes to longer school trips, the degree to which school choice is associated with varying parents’ environmental perceptions and attitudes relevant to active school commuting, and the degree to which school types, based on school choice, affect school travel behavior. Our analysis shows that the school choice policy has significant impacts on increasing school travel distance. For the school district as a whole, the average school travel distance is 1.73 miles under the current school choice program. But the absence of school choice would reduce the total travel distance by 32%. Parents who chose to use the school choice option tended to be of relatively higher family income and higher educational levels. We find that while these parents possessed positive attitude toward ASC, they had tended to give inadequate consideration of ASC in their housing choice. The findings from this research suggest the difficulty of increasing the rate of ASC when some policy serves to discourage the consideration of using ASC.

01329018

11-2572

English

25p

2011

Transportation Research Board 90th Annual Meeting

DVD

Figures (4) ; References; Tables (8)

Attitudes; Commuting; Nonmotorized transportation; School children; School trips; Social factors; Students; Travel behavior; Travel surveys

School choice

Oregon

Highways; Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Public Transportation; Society; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2011 Paper #11-2572

TRIS, TRB

Feb 17 2011 6:12PM