Safety and School Travel: How Does the Built Environment Relate to Correlates of Safety, Mode of Travel and Physical Activity Levels to and from School
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many children do not meet the physical activity targets necessary to accrue health benefits. Declines in active school travel over the past half century are one example of how opportunities for daily physical activity for children have been lost. Adult safety concerns may partially relate to the recent decreases in active school travel. This dissertation examines the connection between safety, the built environment and school travel behaviour. A mixed methods study design explores the links between safety, the environment, physical activity and school transport. \nFindings from the first results chapter suggest that safety in general is a concern for both parents and children but safety concerns are not uniform. Both parents and children were worried about strangers, while children identified additional concerns such as dogs and bullies. Traffic safety concerns related to street crossings, incomplete sidewalks and traffic around the school. \nFurther analysis determined that objective measures of the environment such as street crossings, sidewalk, traffic and parking relate to mode of travel. Perceptions regarding the presence of strangers, street crossings and living in a safe neighbourhood, were also important factors. Differences were observed across the to/from school models, with more environmental features influencing mode choice during the trip to school. \nConcerning children’s health, findings suggest that the environment may relate to healthier body weights along with encouraging walking and minutes of physical activity. Longer distances, mode of travel and traffic calming features along the route to school related to an increase the number of minutes of activity before school. \nThere is evidence that safety is an important factor in determining travel behaviour and features of the built environment may influence these decisions. Current policies aimed at curbing bullying at both the school and provincial level should continue and be expanded. Further work should look at reducing the number of vehicles around the school to increase walking rates. More time walking translates into more physical activity and may assist children in achieving daily physical activity targets.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".