The journey to school is a vital part of a child’s physical, psychological, and social development. It offers children an opportunity to interact and emotionally engage with the world around them, building self-possession and independence.
However, in Australia, the heavy reliance on cars to transport kids to and from school inhibits this, as well as causing myriad environmental issues. Over 1.5 million Australian children attend and leave primary school in a private car, with many of these journeys occurring within walking or cycling distance from their school.
Developing safe and sustainable mobility that safeguards children’s right to access their daily destinations without being dependent on cars needs to be an essential component of local planning policy. However, meeting this need cannot happen until we understand the various factors that enable or constrain how children travel to school, and how children move around generally.
A study by researchers Hulya Gilbert and Ian Woodcock titled, “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” aims to provide this understanding. Using 10 schools across Melbourne and Adelaide, Gilbert and Woodcock examined the role of neighbourhoods and school catchment areas in encouraging or inhibiting private car use. In their analysis, they introduced and tested a Child-Friendliness index (CFI), which assessed the different social and physical environmental features that impact how a child gets to school and the link between child-friendly infrastructure and private car usage.
The schools analysed in this study were specially selected to represent local catchment areas, diverse socio-economic characteristics, and mixed residential density. The study particularly looked at how routes to and from school supported child-friendliness, safety and free movement, peer gathering places, and varied activity settings.
The AURIN ADP was extensively used to generate the Child-Friendliness Index. AURIN tools such as the walkability index, connectivity, diversity index, and neighbourhood generator tools, provided data around street connectivity, population density, land use mix, housing diversity, cycling infrastructure and street networks. These factors were analysed in the CFI to determine how the social and built environment of home and school catchment areas affected children’s mobility.
The researchers found through their spatial analysis that how children travel to and from school depends on the child-friendliness of their home and school environments. In areas where either the child’s home or school area wasn’t child-friendly, car usage was higher while non-car forms of transport such as walking or cycling were lower.
Interestingly, the research showed that proximity to a school didn’t discourage car usage. The study, which calculated the shortest way for the participating children to get to school by either walking or driving, found that for the overwhelming majority of participants, it was shorter to walk than drive to school. However, car use remained high for these short distances, proving that school travel decisions are based on more than proximity.
These findings are crucial when making local living policies that centre around the concept of a local school. Thus far, planning decisions have been based on the assumption that a school’s proximity to children’s homes is enough to guarantee active or public transport use. Instead, the Child-Friendliness Index shows that children’s independent mobility is dependent on more than proximity.
Factors such as traffic safety, active transport infrastructure, urban design schemes, and land use all affect how children get to a destination. This is important as it further emphasises the inordinate impact our local environment has on our mobility and wellbeing.
The Child-Friendliness Index, using AURIN tools, offers policymakers, planners and urban designers a transformative insight into how to promote children’s safe and sustainable mobility and thus support their healthy development.
The implications of this go beyond the issue of school transportation. The level of neighbourhood specific data the CFI collated through platforms like AURIN holds significant potential for shaping child-friendly planning and policy in Australia and elsewhere. The CFI could provide crucial knowledge around how social dynamics are impacting the creation of child-friendly contexts, amongst other uses.
AURIN was delighted to contribute to this research through our portal’s wide range of data tools and looks forward to seeing how the Child-Friendliness Index can go further in promoting the safe and sustainable mobility of Australia’s children.
