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Review of Research on School Travel
Executive Summary
- 1. The proportion of children in Scotland being driven to school by car is increasing rapidly and reached 20% of journeys to school in 2000. This trend is having a negative effect on many transport, health, safety, and environmental factors, and is impacting on the wider economy through growing road congestion particularly in the morning peak period.
- 2. Transport, health and education policies therefore all seek improvements in school travel, identifying community planning approaches to deliver integrated action and best value. This review considers in a Scottish context the lessons from UK and international research on: the factors affecting school travel; the influence of school travel on childrens' development; and the effects of initiatives to improve school travel safety and efficiency.
3. Although levels of car based travel to school are lower in Scotland than in England, they are growing strongly. Trends in school travel are affected by: organisational changes within education, planning policy factors, and social, economic, demographic trends. The growth in car travel to school mirrors substantial growth in car ownership, particularly the number of two car households.
- 4. Children in the UK are open minded about transport, and are generally aware of the impacts of travel decisions on themselves and their environment. Whilst they would like to walk and cycle more, the balance between car travel and other modes still appears to favour the speed and convenience of car travel for an increasing number of trips. Perceptions of safety and risk often do not match actual risk, so influencing attitudes to risk is an important element in changing travel behaviour.
5. For many school trips in Scotland bus travel is the only practical alternative to car travel and the poor image and travel experiences of children on buses is a major concern. Greater respect for buses as a mode needs to build on the greater social and independence opportunities provided by bus travel when compared with car travel. However delivering the required change in image will require significant changes in the ways that services are provided and operated.
6. Social factors have a strong influence on travel to school decisions, and where trade-offs need to be made between transport, health, environmental, and social factors the social issues tend to dominate. However travel choice is very complex involving such a large range of factors that reliable analysis would require very large studies of behaviour.
7. Non-car travel can have some positive influences on childrens' development. The school journey offers the opportunity for developing social relationships with adults, and with other children from within and outwith normal peer groups. Greater independence helps with the development of spatial skills and may improve organisational skills including time and money management. Regular exercise walking or cycling to and from school also has a positive influence on health.
8. Success in implementing initiatives to improve school travel is sensitive to the local context, making generalised conclusions on the impacts of different types of initiative difficult. Nevertheless, there is a large menu of types of initiatives that have proved successful and these can be used to develop detailed plans with local communities. When generic solutions are imposed on communities there is a risk of reducing safety or efficiency.
9. Given the success of community based schemes it is of concern that only about 2% of schools have school travel plans. If the majority of schools in Scotland adopted community based safer routes to school approaches then there would be many positive economic, social and environmental benefits. Further research is recommended to identify how to galvanise wider support for effective safer routes to school planning, and on how to target action locally through school centred plans.
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