Effect of Interaction between Distance and Travel Times on Travel Mode Choice when Escorting Children to and from School

Abstract

Recent studies suggest that the activity-travel patterns of parents who escort their children to school have both social and environmental impacts. This paper explores the interaction between distance and travel time levels (TTL) for escorted trips to school. The interaction between travel time and distance was modelled formulating a logit-multilevel model to determine the factors that influence adults’ transport mode choice to escort children to school in metropolitan areas of Andalusia, Spain, where accompaniment is mainly by car or on foot in a maximum reported distance of 2 km. The findings indicate that (1) the interaction between distance and time improves the explanatory capacity of the model and (2) the odds ratio value of escorted trips to school by car is much higher when TTL is low (less than 5 minutes) than when TTL is high (more than 15 minutes). These results suggest that in order to encourage people to escort children to and from school on foot, urban policies should include time policy measures to increase the time dedicated to escorting and to improve the socialisation of escorting time.