Australia ranks amongst the worst for using private cars to transport children to school and despite common assumptions, distance to school is not the main reason for this.
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This issue is driven by a range of social and environmental factors, including concerns about traffic and personal safety, convenience within busy schedules, and a lack of safe and reliable active and public transport options. In many cases, driving is seen as the only viable option to ensure that children reach their destinations on time safely.
However, in addition to road trauma being the leading cause of death for 1-14 year olds in Australia, research highlights that car-based mobility contributes to reduced physical activity and limits children’s opportunities for social interaction and gaining independence, both crucial for their social, emotional and mental wellbeing.
Children who move actively and independently benefit from better physical, emotional and mental health, and improved academic performance.
Additionally, cars significantly contribute to noise and air pollution, profoundly affecting children’s physical and mental health.
The school drop-off is a danger zone
Despite awareness of these issues – safe, sustainable and active forms of access to schools and children’s other regular destinations do not seem to be a priority in land use and transport planning.
Consequently, many schools are not conveniently and safely accessible via active or public transport, leaving many students and their families reliant on cars.
This results in chaotic and dangerous school drop-offs, with afternoon pick-ups the most dangerous of all, while adding significantly to traffic congestion.
Children’s car-dependent lifestyles are a complex issue requiring holistic, sophisticated and locally attenuated responses.
A range of strategies currently exist, such as school travel plans supported by local governments to reduce the number of children arriving at or leaving school in cars.
These plans have praiseworthy objectives such as developing a culture of walking and cycling at a neighbourhood level. However, they are fragmented, non-binding, mostly for primary schools and are yet to engage with private car usage generated by extracurricular activities, being focussed solely on journeys to school.
An alternative approach: Child Friendliness Index
Our recent research paper introduces the Child Friendliness Index (CFI) which combines various social and built environment attributes associated with child-friendly places.
Testing of this index demonstrates that areas with a higher level of child-friendliness have significantly higher levels of walking, cycling and public transport when accessing schools.
As demonstrated by a multi-city study, creating child-friendly neighbourhoods and school zones could significantly increase the level of non-car based mobilities.
By considering a wide range of factors that afford sustainable accessibility for children, the CFI enhances our understanding of the attributes that make a “local school” and provides concrete pointers towards specific actions and interventions required to increase the likelihood of achieving such schools through more intelligent integration of land use planning, urban design and transport.
The application of the CFI to non-school destinations would support the development of clear and precise policies to create a wider range of environments within sustainable transport reach of children: child friendliness does not belong to child-specific areas, instead child-friendly places require a “diverse range of physical and social settings from the immediate environment of the child to citywide locations”.
Future cities fit for future generations
Are we planning our urban futures with children in mind? The increasing reliance among Australians on cars to transport current members of future generations to their everyday destinations suggests we are not.
The CFI offers a decision support tool for reconfiguring local places and transport to be fit for children now and sustain the change into the future.
The alignment of its objectives and ingredients with strategic policies aimed to reduce private car usage (e.g. local living policies) and its replicability to other routine destinations, gives it the capacity to assist with their implementation.
Such issues and related policy responses (such as safe speed limits, parking, road space re-allocation) are highly politicised without clear objectives evident in current political agendas.
This neglect hinders progress in advancing active and public transport use amongst families with children as well as everyone else and fails to realise wide-ranging health, social and economic benefits.
The upcoming local government elections across Australia present a timely opportunity to align such pressing needs with future land use and transport policies.
