Modelling children’s mobility and school commuting: a review and key challenges for further research

Children’s mobility and school travelling are relatively underdeveloped in transport research, especially when compared with commuting to work. Despite it is often argued that a profound analysis of school-travel patterns has the potential to generate many important insights that may impact transport-system policy and management, the modelling of children mobility, is still in an early stage of development and children are often only considered as constraints to adults’ mobility. In this paper, we argue that innovative modelling frameworks that were recently developed in the field of transportation could be adapted and applied to the mobility of children in order to develop both novel scientific insights and inform the development of policies aiming at increasing active and independent mobility of children, in a broader vision of sustainability.