Modeling Escorting School Trips by Employed Parents Based on Latent Variables

Trips are an inseparable aspect of our lives, and nowadays their purposes have been changed and their number has increased. Most of the trips are done by cars, which make lots of harmful influences on our environment (such as pollution, global warming, and lack of energy sources), and they also bring about negative impacts on the economy and society. In order to have sustainable development, transportation managers should make long-term investments and policies on public transportation and active travel modes. In view of that, in addition to socio-economic variables and attributes of trips, we investigate the effect of latent psychological variables such as attitude, perceived behavioral control, subjective norms, and intention on escorting elementary school trips by employed parents. For this purpose, we analyzed and modeled the data of 4000 questionnaires filled by the parents of students of Tehran’s schools. Results obtained from estimating and calibrating the ordered and multinomial Logit models, show that the variables of perceived distance to school, children age, frequency of using the car to school, similarity between start time, and route travel in work and educational trips, intention, perceived behavioral control, existence of a proper person in the family for escorting children, suitable evaluation of one other person in family by parent and choosing public mode in case of similarity between start time, and route travel in work and educational trips in both models were statistically significant. Therefore, we can increase motivation by carrying out programs such as: explaining the importance of environmental and traffic issues, encouraging students and parents to do Supervisional Walking Bus (SWB), building residential settlements near parents’ office and students school, creating safe routes for walking and cycling and increasing the safety of neighborhoods; these programs can increase the probability of using active modes by students.