Exploratory Analysis of Children's Travel Patterns

Recent concerns about obesity in children have focused attention on children's travel behavior; however, there has been little study of children's travel. Five questions should be asked to fill this knowledge gap: (a) How much are children traveling? (b) Why are children traveling? (c) With whom are children traveling? (d) How do the observed travel patterns vary with demographic characteristics such as age, race, sex, and income? and (e) What are the barriers to the analysis of children's travel? Data from the 2001 National Household Travel Survey show that children's travel is similar to that of adults. For example, youth travel is dominated by the automobile, with nearly 75% of trips being made in a private vehicle. But in important ways children's travel is different. Because of their youth, children often travel with others. However, the burden of transporting children is not distributed equally between parents; young children are more than five times as likely to travel with their mothers as with their fathers. Age also greatly affects how much children travel. Finally, small changes in current travel surveys could make them much more useful for the analysis of children's travel. Young Children, Adolescents, SR2S