Is School Travel too Complex to Handle Without a Car? Assessing “Child-Friendliness” as a Pathway to Reducing Private Car use for Children’s Transport

Abstract

Recognising the multifaceted challenges of addressing the dominance of cars for children’s transport, this paper introduces and tests a “child-friendliness index” (CFI) to assess the performance of neighbourhoods and school catchments to enable or constrain how children travel to school. The findings demonstrate that car trips both to and from school are negatively associated with child-friendliness. However, counter-intuitively there was no significant association between distance and car use, which remained high for shorter distances (< 4 km). These findings imply school travel decisions are susceptible to many factors. We discuss the policy pathway provided by CFI for school accessibility planning.