The “Path” Not Taken: Exploring Structural Differences in Mapped- Versus Shortest-Network-Path School Travel Routes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: School route measurement often involves estimating the shortest network path. We challenged the relatively uncritical adoption of this method in school travel research and tested the route discordance hypothesis that several types of difference exist between shortest network paths and reported school routes. METHODS: We constructed the mapped and shortest path through network routes for a sample of 759 children aged 9 to 13 years in grades 5 and 6 (boys = 45%, girls = 54%, unreported gender = 1%), in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. We used Wilcoxon signed-rank tests to compare reported with shortest-path route measures including distance, route directness, intersection crossings, and route overlap. Measurement difference was explored by mode and location. RESULTS: We found statistical evidence of route discordance for walkers and children who were driven and detected it more often for inner suburban cases. Evidence of route discordance varied by mode and school location. CONCLUSIONS: We found statistically significant differences for route structure and built environment variables measured along reported and geographic information systems-based shortest-path school routes. Uncertainty produced by the shortest-path approach challenges its conceptual and empirical validity in school travel research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".