U.S. school travel, 2009 an assessment of trends.

BACKGROUND: The White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity has set a goal of increasing walking and biking to school by 50% within 5 years. Meeting the goal requires a detailed understanding of the current patterns of school travel. PURPOSE: To document nationally representative estimates of the amount of school travel and the modes used to access school in 2009 and compare these levels with 1969, 1995, and 2001. METHODS: The National Household Travel Survey collected data on the travel patterns of 150,147 households in 2008 and 2009. Analyses, conducted in 2010, documented the time, vehicle miles traveled, and modes used by American students to reach school. A binary logit model assessed the influence of trip, child, and household characteristics on the decision to walk to school. RESULTS: In 2009, 12.7% of K-8 students usually walked or biked to school compared with 47.7% in 1969. Rates of walking and biking to school were higher on the trip home from school in each survey year. During the morning peak period, school travel accounted for 5%-7% of vehicle miles traveled in 2009 and 10%-14% of all private vehicles on the road. CONCLUSIONS: There have been sharp increases in driving children to school since 1969 and corresponding decreases in walking to school. This increase is particularly evident in the number of vehicle trips generated by parents dropping children at school and teens driving themselves. The NHTS survey provides a unique opportunity to monitor these trends in the future.

Promotion of walking for transportation: a report from the Walk to School day registry.

BACKGROUND: In the US, promoting active transportation to school has received increased attention as a means of encouraging physical activity and preventing obesity among youth. However, little systematic evaluation of existing programs, such as Walk to School (WTS), has occurred. METHODS: WTS coordinators from across the US were surveyed (via web, mail, and telephone) about program activities, school and environmental characteristics, and perceived changes in children walking to school. As an exploratory aim, logistic regression analyses were used to examine program characteristics associated with perceived increases in children walking. RESULTS: From a database of 783 coordinators, 493 usable surveys were returned. Almost all respondents (98.2%) participated in a one-day WTS event. Other common activities included promotional activities (72.7%), safety trainings (49.6%), walkability audits (48.5%), and designated safe walking routes (46.5%). As part of their WTS efforts, 24.4% made policy changes and 38.4% made changes to the physical environment. Logistic regression analyses showed that policy changes, physical environment improvements, and number of activities were associated with the largest perceived increased in children walking to school. CONCLUSIONS: These findings help address the gap in knowledge about schools' participation in WTS programs, and suggest strategies to increase active transportation to school.

Who is pre-occupied with sleep? A comparison of attention bias in people with psychophysiological insomnia, delayed sleep phase syndrome and good sleepers using the induced change blindness paradigm.

Cognitive models of insomnia suggest that selective attention may be involved in maintaining the disorder. However, direct assessment of selective attention is limited. Using the inducing change blindness (ICB) paradigm we aimed to determine whether there is attentional preference for sleep-related stimuli in psychophysiological insomnia (PI) relative to delayed sleep phase syndrome (DSPS) and good sleepers (GS). In the ICB task, a visual scene, comprising both sleep-related and neutral stimuli, 'flickers' back and forth with one element (sleep or neutral) of the scene changing between presentations. Therefore, a 2 x 3 totally between-participants design was employed. The dependent variable was the number of flickers it took for the participant to identify the change. Ninety individuals (30 per group) were classified using ICSD-R criteria, self-report diaries and wrist actigraphy. As predicted, PI detected a sleep-related change significantly quicker than DSPS and GS, and significantly quicker than a sleep-neutral change. Unexpectedly, DSPS detected a sleep-related change significantly quicker than GS. No other differences were observed between the two controls. These results support the notion that there is an attention bias to sleep stimuli in PI, suggesting that selective attention tasks such as the ICB may be a useful objective index of cognitive arousal in insomnia. The results also suggest that there may be an element of sleep preoccupation associated with DSPS. Results are discussed with reference to other experiments on attentional processing in insomnia.