Safety and School Travel: How Does the Environment along the Route Relate to Safety and Mode Choice?

This study examines the relationship between safety, the built environment, and the mode of travel to and from school. The paper contributes to the literature by analyzing the actual route traveled through the use of objective traffic data within school neighborhoods. Parents and children completed a survey and mapping exercise to obtain travel routes to and from school, a methodological improvement over network shortest-path analysis. Manual traffic counts around the sampled schools (n = 17) were conducted. Logistic regression analysis confirmed a priori expectations about the effects of distance, gender, and the number of vehicles per licensed driver. New insights into safety were produced through inclusion of objective metrics designed to explore the safety of the pedestrian environment. A higher number of vehicles, a higher number of crossing streets, incomplete sidewalk networks, and the presence of parking facilities emerged as potentially important transport supply-, design-, and safety-related factors. If children perceived their neighborhood to be a safe area in which to walk alone, they were also more likely to walk. For parents, the perception that strangers were present and the presence of busy streets influenced the mode of travel. Different effects were produced across separately estimated home-to-school and school-to-home models.