Citation

Waygood EOD, Friman M. Travel Behav. Soc. 2015; 2(3): 174-181.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.tbs.2015.03.003

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Previous research has found relationships between children's travel and their community. Knowing people in the neighbourhood can reduce parental anxiety and facilitate greater independent (Bonner, 1997 and Alparone and Pacilli, 2012) or active travel (McDonald et al., 2010). Independent mobility, in turn, is also associated with building social capital (Weller and Bruegel, 2009). The process of building local social capital may be linked with incidentally seeing neighbours while travelling (Grannis, 2011), but the likelihood of such incidental connections has not been previously demonstrated empirically. This study is the first to empirically demonstrate that the likelihood of seeing people relates to how a child travels. Further, with respect to lowering parental anxiety, a distinction between seeing a known person and seeing people in general is made. Incidental community connections can help build social capital. Grannis (2011) explains four steps starting from two individuals that do not know each other but have geographic proximity. The possibility of walking to local destinations creates the chance that those individuals would see each other. If this is frequent enough, familiarity would increase, and some social interaction could develop (e.g. nodding hello, smiling, small talk, etc.). Eventually, this may lead to intentional social interaction (e.g. visiting the neighbour's home). Through this process, Grannis argues how a walkable, mixed-use environment might support social capital in a community. Related to this, a study that compared highly walkable neighbourhoods to ones with low walkability found that children depicted in drawings of their neighbourhoods more active travel and peer interaction in the highly walkable neighbourhoods (Holt et al., 2008). However, no previous study has empirically studied whether the built environment or travel mode might affect the frequency of seeing people. Thus, there is value in determining whether or not there is an association between incidental community connections with the built environment or how one travels to and from ones home. In this research, we examine whether the built environment and travel mode affects the likelihood of a child seeing a known person (reducing anxiety of the child and parents), or seeing people, even if they are not known (first stage of Grannis' theory). This research is facilitated by a unique travel dairy with ten and eleven year old children where the respondents were asked whether or not they saw a known adult or child, or only strangers while travelling between their origin and destination. Thus, it is possible to directly measure whether there are differences in the frequencies of seeing known people across different built environments or by travel mode used. The schools were located in dense urban cores, urban expansion areas, a town, and a farming area.

Language: en