The role of traffic, road design and parent’s perceptions on children active transportation safety: a systematic review
Author(s): Amiour, Waygood
Poster Presentation:
Abstract:
Background:
Children are one of the large groups of the population identified as vulnerable road users. In order to facilitate children’s active travel, the objective relationships between context (road design, traffic, the built environment) and traffic danger must be understood. However, parents often mention traffic danger as a reason to limit their children’s active transport, but how their perceptions relate to the contextual measures is not well established. Thus, to improve active transport for children, both objective and subjective measures must be taken into account, and further, to understand how objective measures relate to subjective measures such as perception of danger.
Aims:
The main goal of this project is to understand which objective and subjective characteristics can influence the safety of children based on the analysis of previous studies in the field. Such information will be useful to increase road safety on the one hand and promote active travel among this vulnerable population on the other.
The present review presents: 1) the role of traffic and environment features on child pedestrian and cyclist’s injuries; 2) parents and children’s perception of safety for active commuting; 3) the associations between objective and subjective measures; and 4) the relationships between objective-subjective measures and the likelihood of transport-related injuries for children.
Methods:
A systematic review was conducted using the electronic databases: Web of science (2000-2019), PubMed (2000-2019), Compendex (2000-2019) and Inspec (2000-2019). The keywords cannot all be presented here, but followed these general themes: safety, traffic, built environment, social environment, children, perception and active transportation. The total number of items retrieved was initially 2266 articles, which was reduced to 45 articles following the eligibility criteria and quality assessment.
Results:
Full results are not yet available, but will be presented at the conference. Preliminary results of the research are limited here to a general description of the articles. The retained articles were divided into three types: 1) objective measures (53%), 2) subjective measures (34%), 3) both objective and subjective measures (13%). For collision articles, only articles considering people under 18 years old. For subjective views, parental and/or children’s perceptions were limited to those that focused on children less than 16, those who are not yet eligible for a driver’s license.
29% of articles were focused on Canada, with 58% percent from North America, representing a large majority. The majority of articles used police and hospital data sources for children’s injuries. For subjective measures, 10 articles contained results for parents only, 6 articles for children, and 5 for both parents’ and children’s perceptions.
Discussion:
The next steep will be focused on the results of the papers, grouping them by: objective measures that influence traffic collisions for children; the types of perceptions measured; relationships found between objective and subjective (e.g., perceptions) measures.
Conclusions:
The results will help policy strategy to enhance the safety of children when using active transport mode.