Title: Youth walking and cycling: the relationship between active travel and urban form
Abstract: Active travel of children and adolescents is a major public health challenge of the modern era but, when promoted and nurtured, offers immediate health benefits and forms future sustainable and healthy travel habits. This study explores jointly the choice and the extent of active travel of youth while considering walking and cycling as distinct travel forms, controlling for objective urban form measures, and taking both a “street view” looking at the immediate home surroundings and a “bird’s eye view” looking at the neighborhood environments. A Heckman selection model represents the distance covered while cycling (walking) given the mode choice being bicycle (walk) for a representative sample of 10-15 year-old children from the Capital Region of Denmark extracted from the Danish National Travel Survey. Results illustrate the necessity of different urban environments for walking and cycling, as the former relates to “street view” urban form measures and the latter also to “bird’s eye view” ones. Results also show the need for measures aiming at traffic reduction and speed calming, diminution of heavy vehicle movements in local streets, lessening of cyclist-motorist conflicts at intersections, and decrease of cycling crash frequency and severity. Last, results indicate that campaigns should address perceptions and social norms in neighborhoods located outside the city or populated with higher percentages of immigrants in order to motivate active travel of children.
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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