Understanding School Travel: How Residential Location Choice and the Built Environment Affect Trips to School

The past several decades have witnessed a rapid increase in parents driving children to school. Nation-wide surveys have indicated that nowadays more than 65 percent of children are driven to schools by private automobiles. In many communities, close to 30 percent of morning peak hour traffic are school trips. Efforts to reduce the number of auto-trips to school and substitute them with walking or biking trips will help address morning peak hour traffic congestion and issues around creating healthy communities. Children’s potential to walk to school depends on where they live. Surprisingly, we know very little about how families make…

The past several decades have witnessed a rapid increase in parents driving children to school. Nation-wide surveys have indicated that nowadays more than 65 percent of children are driven to schools by private automobiles. In many communities, close to 30 percent of morning peak hour traffic are school trips. Efforts to reduce the number of auto-trips to school and substitute them with walking or biking trips will help address morning peak hour traffic congestion and issues around creating healthy communities.
Children’s potential to walk to school depends on where they live. Surprisingly, we know very little about how families make their residential location choice as it relates to school travel. Existing school travel research has generally focused on environmental characteristics that have potential to effect behavioral change, along the line of reasoning that school travel decision is made in reaction to environmental conditions or changes in those conditions. In this proposed project, we argue that parents’ decision about school transportation means may start at when they decide where to live. Or in other words, school travel should be treated as an integral part of residential location choice.
We attempt to examine the relationship between parents’ residential location decisions with the built environment and travel mode to school. Our specific research aims are to address these following questions: 
1. How is school travel implicitly or explicitly considered in families’ decision-making process for residential location, a process that generally involves trade-offs a family faces in addressing its various needs?
2. What and how do local environmental factors, such as land use patterns, street network characteristics, transportation opportunities, and housing stock characteristics around school sites play a role in housing location choice, and in turn home-school proximity?
3. To what degree does family location preference is constrained by school siting and other environmental factors, and how does the constraint affect school travel behavior?
We will survey random samples of families with children attending selected public schools in City of Eugene’s 4J school district. The We will collect information on children’s school travel behavior, household background, parents’ attitude toward school travel means, and their consideration of school travel in residential location choice. Schools will be selected based on type, quality, size, and location. Working closely with Community Planning Workshop, a service learning program at the University of Oregon, we will conduct focus groups and interviews. We will create a GIS database to map family locations, measure home-school distances, and develop indicators for the built environment around school sites. Using discriminant analysis and logistic regression, we will identify environmental and household factors that explain/predict variations in school-home proximity and school travel behavior.

A comprehensive strategy aimed at reducing school auto-trips should consider providing more walkable environments and reducing the demand for auto-travel. Information and knowledge generated from this project will contribute to the literature on transportation (land use-transportation link), residential preferences, and healthy communities. There is an immediate need for this type of knowledge in setting school policy.  These issues are national in scope and we expect the results of our work to be relevant to practitioners and researchers across the country.