Carlotta Henning
Carlotta is master student pursuing a dual degree between Metropolitan Analysis, Design and Engineering at Delft University of Technology and Wageningen University and Research, and Geoinformation Science at Wageningen University and Research. As part of her first master thesis, she discovered her passion for active mobility, and pursued this interest by researching how parents’ perception of traffic safety might be formed in a more bike-centric culture.
Přednáška
The Netherlands has experienced a decline in active school travel over the last decade. This is concerning, considering that active school travel supports children’s health and independence. Children’s mobility choices are often linked to parents’ perception of their environment and traffic safety specifically. However, there is currently little knowledge on what specific factors inform parents’ perceived traffic safety in a more 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 the Netherlands. Overall, this research established several factors that informed parents’ perceived traffic safety. These 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 (e.g. biking skills) and parents’ approach to risk mitigated parents’ perceived traffic safety. Moreover, this research indicated that parents’ perception of traffic safety did not solely depend on the individual factors found along the routes, but also on the combination of factors present at any specific location. For example, a zebra crossing was perceived as less safe when coinciding with low visibility and fast-moving traffic. These findings largely overlapped with the literature, with some important additions, which can be attributed to the bike-oriented context and methods of this study. A key inference from this study was that parents reduced the risk along their routes by minimizing the chance for and consequences of unexpected behavior by their kids and other road actors. Hence, parents favored infrastructure which minimized the consequences of mistakes (e.g. independent bike paths) and infrastructure where road actors’ behavior matched the expectation set by the infrastructure (e.g. traffic lights where cars stop). However, the conclusions in this research should be reconfirmed with a larger sample.