Getting there: How commuting time and distance impact students’ health

Abstract

This study investigates the impact on Thai students’ health of commuting to school, both in terms of time and distance. The individual-level dataset used in this study is obtained from the National Statistical Office (NSO) and limited to students aged from 9 to 18 years old, with 25,461 respondents. While the data were collected in 2016, with mostly unchanged commuting behaviors of Thai students, our results can reflect current health impacts from school commutes. The data indicate that traffic in Bangkok causes students to commute longer to schools than in other provinces. The results from the ordered logistic regression consistently show that commuting time has stronger negative impacts on health than commuting distance does. In other provinces, our results show that long commuting time and distance negatively affect physical and mental health of students. The present study also indicates that investigating either commuting distance or commuting time could bias the results in some sequences.