Travel Behaviour of Households with Pre-School Aged Children: A Structural Equation Modelling Approach
Child-care centers are major trip generators for households with pre-school aged children (<5 years). This paper presents a framework to analyze the factors affecting daily travel choices and challenges of child-care going households. Through rigorous literature review, this study first identifies important variables affecting mode choice, child-care center choice, transit use, and intention to drive. Next, it develops and distributes an online survey questionnaire to the registered child-care centers in Halifax Regional Municipality, Canada, to get data on individual household’s travel choices, challenges, factors affecting those choices, importance level of those factors, as well as socio-demographic information. The study collects data from over 200 households, which are then analyzed using structural equation modelling (SEM) to examine the effects of the identified factors, such as, safety, cost, distance, location, affordability, and convenience on day-to-day child-care trip decisions. The findings suggest that most of the families rely on private vehicles (73%) to make child-care trips as a result of family time, travel freedom, and parking availability. Other variables that motivate them to drive are travel safety, convenience, and opportunity to do trip chaining. Results show that 57% of the households group their child-care trip with work trip. Distance to nearest bus stop, carrying child-belongings, and length of trip to child-care are considered major barriers for transit use. The results of this study are expected to assist policy makers to understand travel patterns and barriers of households with pre-school aged children and help in designing communities to promote sustainable travel behavior.
- Record URL:
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Supplemental Notes:
- This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AEP30 Standing Committee on Traveler Behavior and Values.
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Corporate Authors:
Transportation Research Board
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Authors:
- Habib, Muhammad Ahsanul
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0000-0003-1461-9552
- Anik, Md Asif Hasan
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0000-0001-6007-6785
- Robertson, Caroline
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Conference:
- Transportation Research Board 100th Annual Meeting
- Location: Washington DC, United States
- Date: 2021-1-5 to 2021-1-29
- Date: 2021
Language
- English
Media Info
- Media Type: Digital/other
- Features: Figures; References; Tables;
- Pagination: 19p
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Decision making; Households; Mode choice; Preschool children; Questionnaires; Structural equation modeling; Surveys; Travel behavior; Travel patterns
- Geographic Terms: Halifax (Canada)
- Subject Areas: Highways; Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation; Society;
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 01764958
- Record Type: Publication
- Report/Paper Numbers: TRBAM-21-00907
- Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
- Created Date: Feb 17 2021 7:23PM