In that case, is there data that shows people walking to schools when it is sufficiently close to them? If not, then distance is not a relevant factor, and some other things like civil unsafety can be looked at as potential reasons.
You're asking for data that shows that people walk to schools when they're close? Seems self evident that if you're half a block from school 0% of people will drive and if you're 15 miles from a school, 100% of people will drive.
But okay...
Distance and traffic danger (also a function of urban planning decisions) are by far the strongest predictor of whether kids walk to school.
not if there are other factors e.g lack of civil safety.
But yes, the data does show that most things are held relatively equal when grouping reasons into <1mile and >1mile. So distance seems to be the clear factor. Nice article.
One other thing to note is that in older suburbs, there tends to be a school within the boundary of the arterial road grid, which is often about mile spacing, so increasing the distance to school also substantially increases the amount of heavy traffic streets to walk alongside or cross.
