Abstract
Research has shown that parental attitudes are a significant predictor of childrenâ??s active commuting (walking or biking) to school. However, the impact of parental gender on parental attitudes, and the link between parental attitudes and the gender gap in parental escort behavior have not received much attention. This paper examines these questions by applying discrete choice models to California data from the 2009 National Household Travel Survey while controlling for a wide range of variables characterizing parents, their children, households, schools, and the local built environment. Our results show that mothers are more likely to have higher concerns about traffic volume and speed, which in turn reduces the likelihood that their children will walk or bike to school. Moreover, parental attitudes (especially mothersâ?? attitudes) significantly influence parental escort behavior, although their ability to explain the within-household gender escort gap is limited. However, the escort duties of mothers are reduced when they bike more often, which suggests that more biking by parents encourages children to actively commute to school. Finally, while distance to school and several land use measures (e.g., population density, urbanization level, and percentage of renters) are statistically significant, the impact of an objective measure of walkability is quite small. These results suggest that interventions targeting an increase in childrenâ??s walking and biking to school should focus on the concerns of mothers, especially as they relate to traffic characteristics.