Safer Together

Abstract

The Netherlands has experienced a decline in active school travel over the last decade. This is concerning, considering that active school travel is essential to support children’s health and independence. Parents’ perceived traffic safety is often linked to children’s mobility choices, but there is little knowledge on what factors inform parents’ perceived safety in a bike-oriented context. This research employed a combination of literature reviews and interviews with mental maps, to understand what factors influenced parents’ perceived traffic safety in a bike-oriented context, like the Netherlands. Overall, this research established a multitude of factors that informed parents’ perceived traffic safety. These factors included, but were not limited to, complex crossings, high speed, high traffic volume, type of bike path, type of crossing, and accidents along the route. This research also highlighted that children’s characteristics and parents’ approach to risk mitigated parents’ perception of traffic safety. The results further showed that parents’ perception of traffic safety did not solely depend on the factors found along the route, but also on the interplay between factors at any specific location. These findings largely overlapped with the literature, with some important additions, which can be attributed to the bike-oriented context and use of interviews in this study. A key supposition from the study was that parents focused on minimizing the uncertainty along their travel route to feel safe. Hence, they preferred routes where their expectations matched the resulting behavior and where infrastructure elements minimized the consequences of any mistakes their children made. The conclusions in this research should be reconfirmed with a larger sample.