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Shared school transportation: determinants of carpooling as children’s school travel mode in California

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A Correction to this article was published on 03 January 2019

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Abstract

Carpooling has potential as an alternative mode of school transportation along with other viable options, especially at a time when technology continues to increase our reliance upon shared mobility. Unfortunately, our knowledge of carpooling as a school travel mode is very limited. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap. Using a multinomial logit model, this study presents an analysis of data from the 2012 California Household Travel Survey to assess the effects of various factors, such as trip characteristics, child characteristics, parental or caregiver’s characteristics, household characteristics, and spatial variables on choosing carpooling as a school travel mode. The findings of the study indicate that travel distance is one of the major determinants of carpooling, suggesting that children are more likely to carpool to school as travel distance from home to school increases. The analysis shows that a higher income two-parent two-earner family with a 5–15-year-old female schoolchild is more likely to use carpooling for school trips when compared to other modes of transportation. Parental/caregiver characteristics are also found to be important, as children from households with young, female, higher educated heads are more likely to carpool to school. Results of spatial variables suggest that families living in neighborhoods with higher numbers of schoolchildren are also more likely to carpool. The empirical evidence presented in this study provides useful insight to school districts, policymakers, and other transportation related entities in identifying potential target groups to whom this travel mode could be presented.

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  • 03 January 2019

    In the online published article, in figure 2 a value is missing in column 4. The correct figure is given in this correction. The original article has been corrected.

Notes

  1. Walkable distance refers to less or equal to 1.5 miles or 2.4 km (Nelson et al. 2008).

  2. The school grade level of students (K–12th) is provided as two distinct categories in the CHTS: K–8th grade and 9th–12th grade.

  3. Odds = exponential value of the logit coefficient.

  4. This is further supported by our data that approximately 62% of households in our sample with incomes over $100 k consisted of dual earners.

  5. 10.17% = 1 − exp(0.097) = 0.1017.

  6. 3.57% = 1 − exp(0.0351) = 0.0357.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the comments/feedback received from the three anonymous reviewers that helped them substantially improve the paper.

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  1. Rezwana Rafiq and Suman Kumar Mitra have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Transportation Studies (ITS), University of California, Irvine, CA, 92697-3600, USA

    Rezwana Rafiq & Suman Kumar Mitra

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  1. Rezwana Rafiq
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RR: Literature Search and Review, Manuscript Writing; SKM: Data Cleaning and Analysis, Manuscript Writing.

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Correspondence to Suman Kumar Mitra.

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The original version of this article was revised: In the original publication of the article, Fig. 2 value was missing in column 4. The correct Fig is given in the article.

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Rafiq, R., Mitra, S.K. Shared school transportation: determinants of carpooling as children’s school travel mode in California. Transportation 47, 1339–1357 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-018-9942-z

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