Investigating the effect of the spatial relationship between home, workplace and school on parental chauffeurs’ daily travel mode choice

Since many parents travel separately for escorting and commuting, certain hidden daily car trips may have been ignored in previous research regarding parental escort behaviors. By defining an escort-space model using the spatial relationships between home, the workplace, and school, this study focuses on the daily modal split among parental chauffeurs using data from Qujing, China, while focusing on the effects of different escort-space models: spatial aggregation, job-housing separation and school-housing separation. The descriptive statistics of parental chauffeurs’ travel mode choices under the influences of these three escort-space models are presented. The statistical results demonstrate that the modal splits of parental chauffeurs perform significantly differently under these three escort-space models. Furthermore, the determinants of the daily travel mode of parental chauffeurs, including escort-spaces and other selected variables, are investigated using a multinomial logit model. A model without the escort-space model is also presented for comparison. The results show that the model with the escort-space model has a more significant goodness-of-fit than the model without the escort-space model. Both the job-housing separation and school-housing separation of parental chauffeurs result in the increase of car trips, while the usage amount of car in daily journeys is higher than that in escort trips. Moreover, car ownership, bike ownership, household income, residential location, age, gender, income, and education level all significantly impact the daily travel mode choices of parental chauffeurs. These findings can help policymakers create suitable policies to reduce excessive car trips by parental chauffeurs.