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

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.

于对解决儿童交通中汽车占主导地位一事之多方面挑战的认识，本文引入并测试了一个“儿童友好指数”（CFI），以评估社区和学校招生地区的表现，从而使儿童能够采用或限制儿童上学的方式。研究结果表明，往返学校的汽车行程与儿童友好性呈负相关。然而，距离和汽车使用之间反直观地没有显著的关联，在较短的距离（<4公里）内，这一关联仍然很高。这些发现表明，上学交通方式的选择容易受许多因素影响。我们探讨了CFI为学校无障碍规划提供的政策途径。