Impacts of Parental Gender and Attitudes on Children’s School Travel Mode and Parental Escort Behavior

摘要

Research has shown that parental attitudes are a significant predictor of children’s activecommuting (walking or biking) to school. However, the impact of parental gender on parentalattitudes, and the link between parental attitudes and the gender gap in parental escort behaviorhave not received much attention. This paper examines these questions by applying discretechoice models to California data from the 2009 National Household Travel Survey whilecontrolling for a wide range of variables characterizing parents, their children, households,schools, and the local built environment. Our results show that mothers are more likely to havehigher concerns about traffic volume and speed, which in turn reduces the likelihood that theirchildren will walk or bike to school. Moreover, parental attitudes (especially mothers’ attitudes)significantly influence parental escort behavior, although their ability to explain the within12household gender escort gap is limited. However, the escort duties of mothers are reduced whenthey bike more often, which suggests that more biking by parents encourages children to activelycommute to school. Finally, while distance to school and several land use measures (e.g.,population density, urbanization level, and percentage of renters) are statistically significant, theimpact of an objective measure of walkability is quite small. These results suggest thatinterventions targeting an increase in children’s walking and biking to school should focus on theconcerns of mothers, especially as they relate to traffic characteristics.