Family Transport: Finding the Low-Hanging Fruit for Mode Shift
Key Takeaways
- Families are highly diverse in their transport needs, making one-size-fits-all policy solutions almost certain to fail.
- Having children dramatically increases car dependency due to structural barriers, including suburban living, infrastructure gaps, time poverty, and the economics of group travel.
- Complete car abandonment is unrealistic for most families, but a meaningful reduction in car use for specific trips is achievable.
- The school run represents the lowest-hanging fruit for mode shift, with simple home-school-home trips offering the best opportunity for change.
- Relatively cheap interventions like school streets, 20mph zones, and safer junctions can deliver substantial benefits, including healthier children, improved safety, reduced congestion, and time savings for parents.
- E-cargo bike lending schemes show potential, with suburban households reducing car mileage by 51% in trials.
- Lower public transport fares rarely shift families out of cars but do starve systems of revenue needed for service improvements.
- Transport policy should not be used as a welfare policy; families in need of financial support should receive direct assistance through welfare systems.
- Family passes for public transport are most useful for leisure trips rather than everyday journeys, such as school runs or shopping.
- Transport planners need specific, evidence-based strategies targeting achievable trip reductions for families.
What next?
Do you have strategic objectives for reducing family car-dependency?
Introduction
It is time for a confession. I have three children, ages 5, 7 and 9. We live in suburbia and we are car-dependent. Yes, I get into the city on the Metro, walking the first and last mile, and we have local shops and a park within easy walking distance, but far too many of our trips are by car.
We are not alone. Many families are even more car-dependent than we are.
The irony isn't lost on me. I spend my professional life thinking about sustainable transport, yet my own family relies heavily on a car. But this isn't a story about hypocrisy, it's about reality. The structural barriers that keep my family car-dependent are the same ones affecting millions of households worldwide.
When I see discussions on various transport policies, fares, road user charging, parking levies for bigger cars, I often see people lamenting the impact on family budgets. What I rarely see is acknowledgment of the true cost: how car dependency itself drains family finances, constrains children's independence, and limits parents' choices.
This raises a question that deserves more attention than it gets: how should we think about families when it comes to transport policy?
The answer isn't simple, because families aren't simple. But that complexity shouldn't be an excuse for inaction. This blog examines the real challenges families face, identifies where meaningful progress is actually possible, and argues for focusing our efforts on the interventions that work, rather than the ones that merely sound good.
What do I mean by family?
Before going further, we need to address a fundamental challenge: "family" is not a useful analytical category for transport planning. Families are spectacularly diverse, and any attempt at a one-size-fits-all policy is almost sure to fail.
Consider the variations:
Household composition. A single parent with one toddler faces completely different transport challenges than two parents with three teenagers. Whether grandparents live in the household adds another layer of complexity.
Location is destiny. Inner city families have different options than suburban families, who in turn have different options than rural families. Where you live often determines whether car-free living is even theoretically possible.
Life stage and logistics. The age of children fundamentally shapes transport needs. A family with children under five requires strollers and constant supervision. Teenagers can navigate independently but often have more dispersed activities requiring coordination.
Time and money constraints. Families where both parents work face different time pressures than single-earner households. The financial burden of car ownership hits low-income families hardest, yet they often have the fewest alternatives.
Culture and parenting styles. Different cultural norms lead families toward particular transport modes. Meanwhile, parenting approaches matter: helicopter parenting and the impulse to schedule every minute of a child's day increase car dependency.
This heterogeneity is precisely why public transport planners have historically focused on commuters. Commuter travel is relatively straightforward: large-scale movements in the same direction along key corridors during morning and evening peaks. It's predictable. It's scalable.
Family travel? It's neither.
A single afternoon trip might involve stopping at the local shop for dinner ingredients, picking up kids from school, dropping one child at football practice, and then heading home. This multi-stop pattern, known as trip chaining, defies the logic of radial public transport networks designed for commuters.
The complexity is real. But it's not a reason to give up. It's a reason to think more carefully about which interventions actually work for which families and to stop pretending that blanket solutions will solve everyone's problems.
What Are the Challenges?
Giving up a car is challenging for anyone. But having children amplifies the difficulty dramatically. Understanding why helps explain why well-intentioned policies often fail to change family behaviour.
Geography and infrastructure work against families. The arrival of children often triggers a move from the inner city to the suburbs, where families can afford more space. But suburban areas typically offer poor alternatives to driving. The public transport that does exist is often designed for commuters heading downtown, not for the complex, multi-directional trips families need to make.
The infrastructure that does exist isn't designed for family needs. Try navigating a train station with a stroller when there's no lift. Try getting two young children safely across a busy junction where the pedestrian crossing time assumes you can sprint. The bar for "good enough" infrastructure is much higher when you're responsible for small humans.
Car sharing stops working. Many young professionals happily use car share services for occasional trips. But car seats change the equation entirely. Installing and removing them is time-consuming. Many car share vehicles don't have them. Suddenly, owning becomes easier than sharing.
The cost structure favours cars for families. Public transport fares are charged per person. A family of four pays four times as much as a solo traveller. In a car, the cost of fuel or a toll stays roughly the same whether there's one person or five. The bigger your family, the worse the economics of public transport become.
Time poverty is real. Many families are desperately time-poor, especially when both parents work. Journey time becomes critical in decision-making. Cars are often the fastest option, particularly for trip chains. Spending an extra 30 minutes on public transport isn't just inconvenient; it can break the whole logistics puzzle of getting everyone where they need to be.
Children's activities assume car access. Kids' sports are a perfect example. Home games are usually local and manageable without a car. But away games? They're often in locations with no public transport access, particularly on weekends when service is reduced. Saying no to these activities means excluding your child from important social experiences.
The car serves social functions too. Beyond pure transport utility, the car provides a protected space for parent-child conversation in otherwise busy schedules. Those 15 minutes driving to an activity become valuable connection time. This matters to families, even if it doesn't appear in transport models.
The research bears this out. Carless couples are significantly more likely to acquire a car when they become parents, and this effect strengthens with each additional child. The car becomes essential infrastructure for household coordination, not by choice but by necessity.
This isn't about parents being lazy or uncommitted to sustainability. It's about rational responses to structural barriers that make car-free family life extraordinarily difficult in most places.
Should Families Be A Priority for Mode Shift?
Given how difficult it is for families to give up their cars, a reasonable question emerges: should we even try? Perhaps we should focus first on childless adults, the lower-hanging fruit who might deliver better returns on investment.
For public transport, this argument has some merit. The structural barriers are formidable, and the economics work against families. But for active transport? The case for prioritising families becomes compelling.
The school run: the lowest-hanging fruit
A significant proportion of school car trips are simple home-school-home journeys with no additional stops. These aren't complex trip chains that require a car. They're straightforward A-to-B journeys where alternatives could work, if we make them safe enough.
The policies needed are often relatively cheap compared to major transport investments: school streets that close to traffic during drop-off and pick-up, walking and cycling buses that enable group travel, safer junctions near schools, and 20mph or 30km/h zones that make roads child-friendly.
The returns are substantial:
- Healthier children arrive at school ready to learn, having had physical activity before sitting down
- Improved safety for everyone as traffic volumes decrease
- Reduced congestion that benefits all road users
- Lower pollution particularly around school gates where children are most exposed
- Time savings for parents who no longer need to make four trips daily
These interventions work where they've been implemented, often dramatically.
E-cargo bikes: an unexpected game-changer?
Another solution is showing promise: giving families access to electric cargo bikes through lending libraries or purchase rebates. When paired with quality cycling infrastructure, protected bike lanes, and secure parking, the results could be transformative.
The ELEVATE project (2023-24) gave 49 suburban households e-cargo bikes to try. The results were striking: households reduced car mileage by 51%, and 10 families liked the bikes so much they bought their own. This wasn't in dense urban areas with perfect cycling infrastructure; these were suburban families, like mine, who found that e-cargo bikes could replace many car trips.
Similarly, the CARTOBIKE kindergarten trial found that providing parents with different bike types increased cycling, decreased car use, and raised intrinsic motivation for cycling. Effects persisted even through the winter months. E-bikes proved most effective because the electric assist makes transporting children manageable, even over distances or hills that would be prohibitive on conventional bikes.
What does this mean for priorities?
Complete car abandonment is unrealistic for most families in the foreseeable future. The structural barriers are too significant.
But meaningful car use reduction for specific trips? That's absolutely achievable, and the research evidence strongly supports it.
The key is precision. We shouldn't try to eliminate family car ownership. We should focus on making specific, high-frequency trips possible without a car:
- The daily school run
- Local shopping trips
- Trips to nearby parks and activities
- Short journeys currently made by car out of habit rather than necessity
These targeted interventions deliver multiple benefits: healthier children, cleaner air, less congestion, and financial savings for families. They also build momentum. Each car trip eliminated makes the next one easier to contemplate.
Should families be a priority for mode shift? Yes, but only if we focus our efforts on the interventions that actually work, rather than pursuing the fantasy of making families car-free in one leap.
What about the costs of transport and their impact on families?
One argument surfaces repeatedly in transport policy debates: user-pays policies, fuel taxes, road user charges, parking levies, hurt family budgets. Therefore, we should keep these charges low or provide exemptions for families.
This argument is politically powerful but analytically weak. It confuses two separate problems and solves neither.
Don't use transport policy for welfare policy
I've written previously about why using transport for welfare policy is fundamentally misguided. Transport is bad at redistribution, and the attempt creates perverse outcomes that make transport systems worse for everyone.
If families face genuine financial hardship, the solution is direct support through the welfare system: higher child benefit payments, increased family tax credits, or other targeted assistance. These tools are designed for redistribution. Transport pricing isn't.
When we distort transport pricing to help families, we create problems that extend far beyond those families:
- We encourage continued car dependency, locking families into ongoing vehicle costs
- We reduce incentives to provide alternatives that might actually reduce family transport costs
- We undermine the price signals needed to manage congestion and fund infrastructure
- We create arbitrary distinctions (why families but not carers? Why not people with disabilities?)
Good welfare policy helps families directly. Bad transport policy pretends to help while making the underlying problem worse.
The public transport fare trap
This brings us to a specific example: public transport fares for families. The argument goes like this: a family of four pays four fares, making driving cheaper by comparison. Therefore, lower fares, or family passes, will get people out of cars.
It's intuitive. It's politically appealing. And the evidence shows it rarely works.
Why lower fares don't shift families out of cars:
The problem isn't primarily about price; it's about service. Lower fares don't make public transport faster, more frequent, or more convenient for complex family trip chains. They don't add routes to suburban areas. They don't make stations accessible for strollers.
All the evidence shows that lower fares rarely lead people to switch out of their cars. Instead, they're more effective at getting people to switch from walking and cycling, the opposite of what we want.
Meanwhile, lower fares across the board starve public transport systems of revenue. Services can't improve. Coverage can't expand. The result is that many families continue to have poor public transport options, making them car-dependent with all the costs that entails.
Are family passes worthless then?
Not necessarily. Well-designed family passes can serve a purpose, just not the one usually claimed.
They're unlikely to shift families out of cars for regular, everyday trips like school runs or grocery shopping. The service limitations matter too much for these journeys.
But for leisure trips? That's different. Families might leave the car behind for a football match where parking is scarce and expensive, a day at the beach, or a concert in the city centre. These are occasional trips where the car's convenience advantage is smaller and the hassle of parking becomes significant.
Family passes can make public transport more attractive for these discretionary trips. That's worth doing. But we shouldn't pretend it's going to have a significant impact on family car dependency.
What about improving public transport?
Of course, where good public transport exists, it makes it much easier for families to live car-free. But the evidence shows that improving public transport alone rarely shifts people out of cars. You also need to make driving less attractive.
In inner-city areas, where parking is often difficult and expensive, better public transport can make a significant difference. But for families that have moved to the suburbs, it is much more challenging. Even in cities with the best public transport networks, suburbs still have high levels of car use.
Of course, there are still opportunities. For example, for older kids, public transport (usually buses) is often a good way to get to and from school.
Conclusion
Families represent one of transport planning's most complex challenges, but also one of its greatest opportunities. While the heterogeneity of family circumstances makes simple solutions elusive, this doesn't mean we should avoid the challenge or resort to one-size-fits-all approaches.
The evidence is clear: complete car abandonment is unrealistic for most families in the foreseeable future. However, a meaningful reduction in car use for specific trip types is both achievable and beneficial. The school run, in particular, stands out as low-hanging fruit, where relatively modest investments in safe walking and cycling infrastructure can deliver outsized returns in child health, safety, congestion reduction, and parental time savings.
Similarly, innovations like e-cargo bike lending schemes show that when we provide families with practical alternatives paired with quality infrastructure, behaviour change follows. The key is focusing on targeted, evidence-based interventions rather than blanket policies like fare reductions that sound family-friendly but often fail to shift families out of cars.
Perhaps most importantly, we need to resist the temptation to use transport policy as a proxy for welfare policy. Families facing financial pressure need direct support through welfare systems, not distorted transport pricing that undermines the quality of services everyone depends on.
The path forward requires transport planners to think more carefully about family needs, not as an afterthought to commuter movements, but as a distinct and worthy planning challenge. By focusing on achievable wins like safer school routes, better cycling infrastructure, and well-designed family passes for leisure trips, we can gradually expand the range of sustainable transport options available to families, even if we can't eliminate their car dependence entirely.