01622553

Component

https://doi.org/10.3141/2666-09

Thousands of communities across America now promote walking and biking (active commuting) to school as a mechanism to increase physical activity, reduce traffic congestion, and improve air quality. Distance to school and attributes of the built environment are crucial factors in a child’s mode choice, and some of the most difficult determinants to influence with programmatic interventions. Further understanding the built environment’s role may help in assessing a school’s mode shift potential and more effectively planning and implementing strategies that increase walking and biking to school. Based on a student travel behavior survey of 18,713 responses from 105 schools in Massachusetts, a multilevel model was used to investigate the effects of route, neighborhood, and school characteristics on walking to school. The model results indicate that the built environment affects the odds of walking to school. Specifically, short routes along less-trafficked streets with mixed land use are associated with the increased odds of children walking to school. Investigating these built environment characteristics of the route, neighborhood, and school through a multilevel model, the study created a framework for examining between-school differences in walk-to-school rates, while controlling for built environment factors of the school and student body. A potential application for this work is to compare walk-to-school rates across heterogeneous schools and contextualize schools’ baseline walk share, set appropriate and measurable mode shift goals, and track their progress over time.

01648400

17-01406

English

pp 78–84

2017

Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board

9780309441926

Digital/other

Figures (2) ; References (27) ; Tables (3)

Built environment; Mode choice; School trips; Walking; Walking distance

Massachusetts

Data and Information Technology; Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Planning and Forecasting

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 8 2016 10:27AM

• Analysis of Car Type Preferences Among Students Based on Seemingly Unrelated Regression
• Analysis of the Impact of Technology Use on Multimodality and Activity Travel Characteristics
• Changing Influence of Factors Explaining Household Car Ownership Levels in the Netherlands
• Digital Narratives of Place: Learning About Neighborhood Sense of Place and Travel Through Online Responses
• Exploring Daily Rhythms of Interpersonal Contacts: Time-of-Day Dynamics of Human Interactions with Latent Class Cluster Analysis
• Exploring the Role of Social Media Platforms in Informing Trip Planning: Case of Yelp.com
• Impacts of Telecommuting on Nonmandatory Activity Participation: Role of Endogeneity
• Inferring Activities from Social Media Data
• Modeling Week Activity Schedules for Travel Demand Models
• Personalization of Routing Services: User Classification as a Method to Overcome the Cold Start Problem for Personalized Models
• The Path of Least Resistance: Identifying Supporters of Public and Active Transportation Projects