Intra-household bargaining for school trip accompaniment of children: A group decision approach

This paper tests a group decision-making model with altruism to examine the school travel behavior of schoolchildren aged between 6 and 18 years in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. The school trip information of 1,737 two-parent families with a schoolchild is extracted from Travel Behavior Inventory data collected by the Metropolitan Council between the Fall 2010 and Spring 2012. The proposed model has four distinctive characteristics compared with traditional developed models in the field of school travel behavior including: (1) considering the schoolchild explicitly in the model, (2) allowing for bargaining or negotiation within households, (3) quantifying the intra-household interaction among family members, and (4) determining the decision weight function for household members. This framework also covers a household with three members, namely, a father, a mother, and a schoolchild, while unlike other studies is not limited to dual-worker families. To test the hypotheses, we developed two models with and without the group-decision approach. Further, the models are separately developed for different age groups, namely schoolchildren aged between 6-12 and 12-18 years. This study considered at a wide range of variables such as work status of parents, age and gender of students, mode of travel, and distance to school. The findings of this study demonstrate that the elasticities of two modeling approaches are different not only in the value, but in the sign in some cases. In more than 90 percent of the cases, further, the unitary household model overestimates the results. More precisely, the elasticities of unitary household model are as large as 2 times more than that of the group-decision model in 25 percent of cases. This is a direct consequence of model misspecification that misleads both long-term and short-term policies where the intra-household bargaining and interaction is overlooked in travel behavior models.

[1]  Peter Vovsha,et al.  Incorporation of Escorting Children to School in Modeling Individual Daily Activity Patterns of Household Members , 2014 .

[2]  M. Kyttä.  The extent of children's independent mobility and the number of actualized affordances as criteria for child-friendly environments , 2004 .

[3]  Sivaramakrishnan Srinivasan,et al.  Modeling children’s school travel mode and parental escort decisions , 2008 .

[4]  Junyi Zhang,et al.  Representing household time allocation behavior by endogenously incorporating diverse intra-household interactions: A case study in the context of elderly couples , 2006 .

[5]  K. Train.  Discrete Choice Methods with Simulation , 2003 .

[6]  Harlan Coben,et al.  One False Move , 1998 .

[7]  Devajyoti Deka,et al.  An explanation of the relationship between adults’ work trip mode and children’s school trip mode through the Heckman approach , 2013 .

[8]  D. Ettema,et al.  Coping with Unreliable Transportation When Collecting Children: Examining Parents’ Behavior with Cumulative Prospect Theory , 2009 .

[9]  Alireza Ermagun,et al.  How Are Children Accompanied to School , 2016 .

[10]  Hsiao-Te Chang,et al.  Built Environment Effects on Children’s School Travel in Taipai: Independence and Travel Mode , 2010 .

[11]  Noreen C. McDonald,et al.  Travel and the social environment: evidence from Alameda County, California , 2007 .

[12]  Noreen C. McDonald,et al.  Why Parents Drive Children to School: Implications for Safe Routes to School Programs , 2009 .

[13]  Becky P.Y. Loo,et al.  Determinants of children's independent mobility in Hong Kong , 2014 .

[14]  Alireza Ermagun,et al.  Students’ Tendency to Walk to School: Case Study of Tehran , 2013 .

[15]  F. Witlox,et al.  How children view their travel behaviour: a case study from Flanders (Belgium) , 2010 .

[16]  Kay W. Axhausen,et al.  A GA-based household scheduler , 2005 .

[17]  O. Bonin,et al.  Who escort children: mum or dad? Exploring gender differences in escorting mobility among parisian dual-earner couples , 2017 .

[18]  Corinne Mulley,et al.  Intra-household Interactions in Tour-based Mode Choice: The Role of Social, Temporal, Spatial and Resource Constraints , 2015 .

[19]  J. Irwin,et al.  The influence of the physical environment and sociodemographic characteristics on children's mode of travel to and from school. , 2009, American journal of public health.

[20]  Chandra R. Bhat,et al.  Modeling intra-household interactions and group decision-making , 2005 .

[21]  Alireza Ermagun,et al.  Promoting Active Transportation Modes in School Trips , 2015 .

[22]  C. DiGuiseppi,et al.  Determinants of car travel on daily journeys to school: cross sectional survey of primary school children , 1998, BMJ.

[23]  W. Elias,et al.  The role of socio-economic and environmental characteristics in school-commuting behavior: A comparative study of Jewish and Arab children in Israel , 2014 .

[24]  Noreen C. McDonald,et al.  Household interactions and children’s school travel: the effect of parental work patterns on walking and biking to school , 2008 .

[25]  Taha Hossein Rashidi,et al.  Mode Choice for School Trips , 2015 .

[26]  A. Timperio,et al.  Parental chauffeurs: what drives their transport choice? , 2013 .

[27]  D. Levinson,et al.  Public transit, active travel, and the journey to school: a cross-nested logit analysis , 2017 .

[28]  Tracy McMillan,et al.  The relative influence of urban form on a child’s travel mode to school , 2007 .

[29]  H. Timmermans,et al.  Modeling household activity travel behavior: Examples of state of the art modeling approaches and research agenda , 2009 .

[30]  Guy Faulkner,et al.  Do parental perceptions of the neighbourhood environment influence children’s independent mobility? Evidence from Toronto, Canada , 2014 .

[31]  Alireza Ermagun,et al.  A joint model for mode choice and escort decisions of school trips , 2015 .

[32]  Corinne Mulley,et al.  Intra-household interactions in transport research: a review , 2015 .

[33]  Sylvia Y. He.  Will you escort your child to school? The effect of spatial and temporal constraints of parental employment , 2013 .

[34]  Frank S. Koppelman,et al.  Modeling household activity–travel interactions as parallel constrained choices , 2005 .

[35]  A. Fujiwara,et al.  Modeling household discrete choice behavior incorporating heterogeneous group decision-making mechanisms , 2009 .

[36]  Peter Vovsha,et al.  Escorting children to school: Statistical analysis and applied Modeling approach , 2005 .

[37]  S. Srinivasan,et al.  Modeling household interactions in daily in-home and out-of-home maintenance activity participation , 2005 .

[38]  Bernard Fortin,et al.  A Test of the Unitary and Collective Models of Household Labour Supply , 1997 .

[39]  A. Fyhri,et al.  Children's active travel and independent mobility in four countries: Development, social contributing trends and measures , 2011 .

[40]  Yusak O. Susilo,et al.  The influence of parents’ travel patterns, perceptions and residential self-selectivity to their children travel mode shares , 2016 .

[41]  M. Bradley,et al.  A model for joint choice of daily activity pattern types of household members , 2005 .

[42]  Yusak O. Susilo,et al.  A long term analysis of the mechanisms underlying children’s activity-travel engagements in the Osaka metropolitan area , 2012 .

[43]  John Barker,et al.  'Manic Mums' and 'Distant Dads'? Gendered geographies of care and the journey to school. , 2011, Health & place.