Home-school travel: Analysis of factors affecting italian parents' mode choice

Pedestrian injury is a major hazard to the health of children in most developed countries. Pedestrian accidents are one of the first causes of injury-related deaths and hospitalizations among children aged 5 to 14 in industrialized countries. This study has a dual objective: 1) to identify the factors affecting Italian parents' propensity to use private cars to accompany their children to school; 2) to analyze the availability of Italian parents to let their children walk to school alone. In order to develop this analysis, the data collected from a survey conducted in front of 9 schools (kindergartens and primary schools) in Catania were used. A path analysis was carried out to analyze these data. The results show that the habit of driving children to school is still very common in Italy. Main reasons why parents drive their children to school are the lack of safe home-school paths and the availability of regular or irregular parking spaces near the school. These results can be useful for those involved in transport planning and safety in order to implement effective actions aimed at encouraging the use of one or several human-powered modes of transportation such as walking or cycling. The results furthermore suggest that infrastructure-centered interventions, such as traffic calming measures and safer pedestrian crossings, can increase parents' safety perception of the home-school paths and thus raise the probability that children walk to school