01473962

Component

Urban and transportation planners have put a special focus on student health and fitness in the past decade, however they struggle to find effective policies to promote walking and biking for school trips. Commuting to school is an opportunity to embed a regular physical activity in students’ daily routines and prevent many health issues that are stimulated by a lack of physical activity during childhood. A three level nested logit model is introduced to explain the motives behind school trip modal selection. Four choice situations, namely walking, driving, school busing, and taking public transit are considered. The authors, particularly, underscored the significance of model misspecification in terms of policy outcomes, since multinomial logit models are typically adopted in the literature and have strong and, in many cases, unrealistic assumptions. For instance, elasticity analysis of the MNL model showed an indirect elasticity of vehicle ownership of -0.13 in the MNL model, while NL model provides different elasticities of -0.12, -0.20, and -0.08, respectively for public, school bus, and walk modes. This misspecification results in over estimating the reduction in the share of students who walk to school when vehicle ownership increases. Moreover, a wide range of policy-sensitive variables along with their effect magnitude was discussed and compared with the previous studies. Particularly, the authors found that one percent increase in the probability of walking to school is expected for every 0.046 percent increase in auto travel time, 0.075 percent increase in the normalized-to-income cost of driving, 0.088 percent decrease in vehicle ownership, 0.033 percent increase in distance to public transit, or 2.372 percent decrease in commute distance. Safety was also found to be very influential on active commuting, such that addressing the safety concern of parents is expected to increase propensity of active commuting to school by around 60 percent.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADD50(1) Health and Transportation.

01470560

13-3618

English

20p

2013

Transportation Research Board 92nd Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Bicycling; Logits; Mode choice; Physical fitness; Public transit; Safety; Walking

Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2013 Paper #13-3618

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Feb 5 2013 12:43PM