Travel behaviour differences between private and public-school students in South East Queensland

Abstract

Australia has seen a steady rise in the number of car-passenger trips made by children to school, and a decline in walking-to-school. Australia differs from most nations in that it has one of the highest rates of private schooling in the world at around 34%, supported by high levels of funding support from the Commonwealth Government. Little is known about the effects this has on travel behaviour and whether it is a factor in our high rates of chauffeuring. This paper looks at journeys-to-school in South-East Queensland. Two research questions were posed: i) how do students in private and public schools travel to school? and, ii) is there any relationship between school type and mode choice? The methods involved advanced geo-spatial matching to allocate all trips made to schools in the 2017-2018 South East Queensland Travel Survey to either public or private schools. The resulting dataset included 617 trips from home to private schools and 2,539 to public schools. Private school students are less likely to walk to school and more likely to be chauffeured, than public school students. For those chauffeured, trip distances are much greater for private secondary school students (median = 7.7km) compared to public secondary school students (4.4km). We estimate that private secondary schooling alone was responsible for around 56 million km of additional private motor vehicle travel on the SEQ road network in 2016. Australia’s policy settings supporting high rates of private schooling appear to be a modest but important contributor to traffic congestion and declines in child physical activity and independent mobility. These impacts should be considered in any holistic evaluation of the costs and benefits of Australia’s school funding model.