Abstract:Although active travel to school for primary school students has been widely studied, research into the determinants of teenage active travel to school is noticeably lacking. Understanding the determinants of teen active travel to school is important given that teenage travel may have implications for the formation of habits that carry over to adulthood. We present evidence linking travel to school with bicycling attitudes and with road environments on plausible paths to school using data from a large cross-sectional survey of students at three high schools in Northern California. Results suggest that the relationship between attitudes and bicycling are stronger than the relationship between road environments and bicycling. Students’ perceived social pressure to bicycle has a particularly strong association with bicycling. Hypothetical intervention scenarios suggest that students would walk and bicycle to school at substantially greater rates if they had better road environments for walking and bicycling, shorter distances to school, and more positive bicycling attitudes.

Keywords: school travel, built environment, bicycling, active travel