Encouraging walking: the case of journey-to-school trips in compact urban areas

An activity-based approach is used to analyse one specific short-trip purpose that has persistently frustrated transport analysts trying to induce more walk, cycle or public transport based trips. This study of the journey-to-school trip is motivated by a general consensus that, to effect a more sustainable transport system, there is a necessity to reduce car use (especially for short trips). Resistance to modal transfer from cars has been shown to be embedded in various psycho-social obstacles which are not readily teased out in orthodox econometric studies of travel demand. We report on an empirical study which fuses psychometric (construction of coping scales) and econometric analyses (logit analysis) in an attempt to uncover the psychological and sociological factors influencing modal choice, as well as the usual range of economic and demographic factors.