Does children’s independent mobility matter? Insights into escorting practices in a developing country

ABSTRACT

Understanding children’s mobility behaviour and parents escorting practices are important to developing a children-friendly society. But only a few studies concerning children’s mobility behaviour have focused on developing countries. In this study, we attempted to develop an econometric model to understand escorting practices in a developing country. A multinomial logit (MNL) model is developed using travel diary data of 398 elementary school-going children, inhabiting in Chattogram City Corporation (CCC) area of Bangladesh. We have considered different combinations of environmental (both school and neighbourhood environment), socio-cultural, household, and personal factors to explain children’s independent mobility behaviour for both school and discretionary trip purposes. The findings suggested that children’s individual (e.g. education level) and parents’ sociodemographic (e.g. income, access to cars, mother’s education level) facilities available at school, and built-environmental factors (e.g. commercial density, road density, land use mix and proximity to open spaces) are significantly associated with parent’s choice for chauffeuring their children in CCC area. Results will be useful to planners and policy makers for formulating effective measures to promote children’s independent mobility and will be a guideline for urban planners to include children’s mobility demand for the neighbourhood as well as city design.

KEYWORDS:

• Children
• independent mobility
• escorting type
• developing country
• Chattogram
• Bangladesh

Acknowledgement

The authors are pleased to express their gratitude to the Department of Urban and Regional Planning of CUET for providing logistic support to carry out this study. They would also like to thank head teachers at government primary schools and the District Primary Education Office in Chattogram for their cordial participation during the survey.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Econometric models are used to estimate the influence of various independent variables on a dependent variable, assuming that each decision-maker is an economic agent. These are based on mathematical, economic, and statistical concepts (Maddala and Lahiri 1992; Wooldridge 2015).

2 In Bangladesh, it is a common practice that household members have access to cars provided by offices (both private and public organizations) for their employees.

Additional information

Funding

This work is funded by Directorate of Research and Extension (DRE) of Chittagong University of Engineering and Technology (CUET) [grant number - CUET/DRE/2017-2018/URP/001].