SAFER WALKING ROUTES TO SCHOOL: APPLIED AND METHODOLOGICAL GEOGRAPHIES OF CHILD PEDESTRIAN INJURY

Abstract

The general theme of this dissertation is understanding and enabling safe walking routes to school for children. We restrict our focus to safety issues related to the motorized-transportation environment, thereby defining safety as a function of factors that determine whether or not a child will be struck by a motor-vehicle on their journey to or from school. Our analysis is unique because it is at a small geographical scale but is representative of an entire urban environment. Working at a small geographic scale allows us to evaluate the variability in safe routes for children within our study area and apply our findings to develop a decision support tool that could be used to plan individualized routes for children in other similar urban environments. Our study area for this dissertation is Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. The findings in this dissertation contribute ideas about how features of the local road environment may and may not influence risk of collisions between child pedestrians and motor-vehicles. It also offers methodological insight for future research on pedestrian safety at small geographic scales. This dissertation demonstrates the potential reduction in the risk of child pedestrian injuries by planning safer routes to school and also introduces methods that can be used to plan safer routes for children. Our results are a reminder of the importance of understanding the interaction between environment and behaviour in research on traffic safety and offer some caution to the notion of a universal 'safe route' to school. Whether or not a particular route to school is safe will very likely be dependent both on the environment and the child's behaviour in that environment.