Over the past several years, the private vehicle has become the predominant mode of travel to school while walking and bicycling rates have decreased. Some suggest that this change in travel behavior contributes to negative health outcomes in children, including increased rates of 1) overweight/obesity through inactivity and 2) pedestrian and bicyclist fatality and injury. A series of recent policies and programs directly attribute the change in travel behavior to school to the urban form of communities. Limited research exists to support this hypothesis, however. The fundamental questions of whether and how urban form impacts a child’s trip to school must to be answered in order to develop effective interventions aimed at increasing rates of walking and bicycling activity and safety.

The research proposes a conceptual framework to examine the nature and shape of the relationships between urban form; interpersonal, demographic and social/cultural factors; parental decision-making and a child’s travel to school. Using parent survey data on children’s travel to school and urban design assessments from twelve elementary school neighborhoods, the relative influence of urban form on the mode choice to school was first determined. Results indicate that urban form elements such as street lights and street widths do affect the probability of a child walking or bicycling to school; however, the affect of these elements is modest compared to other influential variables such as the perceived convenience of driving, country of birth, family support of walking behavior, reported traffic conditions in the neighborhood and perceived distances between home and school.

A second analysis examined how urban form and children’s travel behavior relate by testing the hypothesis of an indirect relationship. The findings show that parent’s feelings of neighborhood safety, traffic safety and/or household transportation options do not intervene in the relationship between urban form and children’s travel behavior. Socio-demographic characteristics and parent’s attitudes toward travel, however, may modify the strength of the relationship between urban form and children’s travel behavior.

The results of this study advance the discussion on relationships between urban form, transportation and health and inform policy and practice of the best targets for future planning interventions.

Communities are traditionally built with one transportation mode and user in mind—the adult automobile driver. Recently, however, there has been an international focus on the trip to school as an opportunity to enhance children’s independent active travel. Several factors must be considered when designing programs to promote walking and bicycling. This paper examined the influence of child sex on caregivers’ decisions about travel mode choice to school.

Caregivers of children in grades three to five from ten California Safe Routes to School communities were surveyed on their child’s normal travel mode to school and factors that determined travel decisions. Results indicate that the odds of walking and bicycling to school are 40 percent lower in girls than boys; however, this relationship is significantly moderated by the caregiver’s own walking behavior. The findings suggest that programs that focus on increasing children’s active travel to school should consider multiple influences on health behavior, including the neighborhood physical activity of parents.

Routes to School National Partnership (Partnership) founded the Local School Project (Project) in 2008 to assist ten schools in lowincome communities to: 1) develop and evaluate a school-based SRTS program, 2) build local capacity to apply for state or federal SRTS funding, and 3) increase safe walking and bicycling to and from the school and in the community. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Kaiser Permanente, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation provided funding for the Project.

This report presents the results, lessons learned and recommendations identified during the Project’s 20-month period. The Project involved a review of the relevant literature, development of a logic model, design and implementation of data collection tools, analysis of findings, and establishment of conclusions and recommendations.

To date, the literature on urban design and walking has often emphasized more macro-scale features, such as block length and number of intersections, that are easier to measure remotely using GIS and or aerial photographs. Urban designers, in contrast, emphasize the importance of micro-scale features in individuals’ use and experience of neighborhood environments. This paper moves beyond examining correlations of individual built environment features and walking, to begin to test proposals about which composite characteristics of the built environment (safety, comfort, etc.) may have the greatest impact on walking. Several urban design characteristics of 11 neighborhoods throughout California were collected. Self-report walking data on the number and types of walking trips were obtained from surveys administered to parents of 3rd-5th graders. Urban design features related to both accessibility and safety affect the amount of walking that adults do in their neighborhood. Grouping related urban design variables into indices provides some clarity as to how the built environment impacts walking. Safety emerges as the most important built environment characteristic (of those tested), related to both destination and recreational walking.

Safe Routes to School (SR2S) programs have generated tremendous interest among U.S. policymakers, planners, and public health officials in recent years. These programs target the walk to school as an essential point of intervention to improve pedestrian safety and increase physical activity among children. In this article, we evaluate California’s pioneering SR2S construction program, which was designed to improve safety for children’s walking and bicycling to school, and to increase the number of children who do so, by funding traffic engineering improvements around schools. Through a systematic evaluation of 10 California SR2S traffic improvement projects near elementary schools, we examined the impacts of this influential state policy on children’s travel behavior in these neighborhoods. We investigated changes in the perceived safety of children’s trips to school, in safety-related behaviors tied to the trip to school, and in the number of children walking and bicycling to school following these improvements. The findings have implications for California’s SR2S program and for similar initiatives throughout the country.