01472411

Component

In the past few decades, active travel in children has decreased tremendously. This trend clearly has negative implications for public health, the environment, and traffic congestion. In order to reverse this trend, it is necessary to understand why some children are walking and biking for transportation and others are not. This paper investigates the role of parent behaviors, attitudes, and decision-making for influencing child bicycling behavior. The authors undertake 25 in-person interviews with parent-child pairs in Davis, California. The qualitative analysis reveals that parents play an important role in determining how often their child rides a bike. Parents influence child bicycling behavior by setting rules about where children can travel, helping them to negotiate barriers, and shaping their attitudes toward bicycling. These results suggest that efforts to encourage bicycling in children should primarily target parents and should seek not only to change parental attitudes, but also behavior.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ANF20 Bicycle Transportation.

01470560

13-3924

English

14p

2013

Transportation Research Board 92nd Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References

Attitudes; Behavior; Bicycling; Children; Decision making; Parents

Davis (California)

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

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2013 Paper #13-3924

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Feb 5 2013 12:46PM