The impact of street network connectivity on active school travel: Norway’s HUNT study

Peter Schön, Eva Heinen, Vegar Rangul, Erik R Sund and Bendik Manum

Environment and Planning B, 2024, vol. 51, issue 9, 2146-2163

Abstract: Active travel to school (ATS) is promoted due to its benefits for health, mental well-being and the environment. Although the impact of the urban form on ATS has been extensively researched, findings have remained contradictory. Existing studies have mainly relied on aggregated, area-based measures, scarcely applying disaggregated, network-based measures of accessibility, street configurations, connectivity or urban density. This study addresses issues related to aggregation and the lack of ATS-specific network measures to evaluate the connectivity of routes to school. We examined the associations of route betweenness, reach and weighted reach with ATS, while adjusting for age, gender, traffic and proximity to school. Population data are disaggregated within a 50-m accuracy of address points. We introduce ‘route betweenness’, a new network-based measure for assessing the connectivity of entire shortest routes. We measured network accessibility around homes as reach (i.e., the number of streets reached through the network), and urban density as weighted reach (i.e., as the floor area or population accessible within walk-/cyclable distances). ATS was measured through self-reported walking or cycling to school (yes or no). The results show positive associations of route betweenness with ATS. The findings further indicate that, whilst higher connectivity and accessibility around home can increase ATS, the connectivity of the network along the way to school, as grasped by route betweenness, is even more important.

Keywords: Active travel to school; adolescents; connectivity; built environment; urban form; accessibility; network analysis; betweenness; HUNT (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23998083241235978 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envirb:v:51:y:2024:i:9:p:2146-2163

DOI: 10.1177/23998083241235978

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning B
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().