A Space-Time Approach to Reducing Child Pedestrian Exposure to Motor-Vehicle Commuter Traffic

Reducing a child’s contact with motor-vehicles on their walk to and from school seems an intuitive approach to making walking to school a safe and attractive transportation option. Most existing approaches focus on either changing the behaviours of children and drivers, or changing features of the environment. While most prevention efforts have emphasized the importance of planning safe walking routes, recent research has suggested that the timing of walking trips to school may also be important. In this research, we study the interaction between safe walking routes and safe walking times using simulations on a synthesized urban environment. We measure the change in exposure to traffic based on both timing of trips and safety of the route taken. Our results suggest that school scheduling can usefully augment safe route choice decisions to reduce child exposure to traffic. Further, the results suggest a 10–50% reduction in exposure depending on the route choice decisions that child pedestrians make. We also observe that safe routes to school should emphasize the safety of journeys in their entirety rather than the safety of specific sections of the transportation network. We see spatial-temporal patterning of exposure at two scales; exposure is earlier in the peripheral areas of the city, but also within school catchment areas themselves. Changing school times may be an effective, inexpensive and practical tool for reducing child pedestrian exposure to traffic, and may be important step to enabling and encouraging more pedestrian activity among children.