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Childhood obesity has become a serious public health challenge during the past few decades, calling for policies to incorporate physical activity into students' routines. This study is an effort to contribute to the current literature of school travels by analyzing how improving safety of different neighborhoods in Chicago, Illinois would encourage students toward shifting to active modes, and how this interrelationship is affected by the severe weather conditions during the cold winters of the region. The results are complemented by multiple sensitivity analyses to quantify how these shifts would help different students burn extra walking calories (i.e. the extra calories each student burns due to walking more). We estimate multiple discrete continuous extreme value models to understand how flexible a student is in combining his/her most preferred transportation mode with other choices. Various sources of inter-personal heterogeneity are also captured by using a latent-classification framework as well as differentiating the before-school from after-school trip chains to consider the behavioral distinction, explicitly. Several explanatory variables are incorporated into the models, including socio-demographics of students and their household, land-use, crime prevalence, and seasonal/weather conditions. Per the results, improving safety of Chicago from its current condition to the national median, would encourage students to be up to 40% more active. This extra active travel demand would provide obese students aged 14–18 with 18% of the calorie burn they need to lose weight to the obesity cutoff and 13% of the calorie burn required for losing weight from the obesity cutoff to overweight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We investigate the dynamics of modal preferences while the MoD services operate. • This study uses the 2017 National Household Travel Survey data. • We utilized the MDCEV formulation to consider marginal rates of substitution. • The substitution relationship between transit and MoD is highly context dependent. • A pro-active approach to planning towards Smart Cities will be vital. Modality style –defined as a set of frequent travel modes characterizing the travelers' habits, routines, and predispositions– is a key player in forming dynamics of travelers' mode choice behavior. This study aims to uncover the dynamics of modal preferences while the Mobility-on-Demand (MoD) services operate in the market. Using the 2017 National Household Travel Survey data, a Multiple Discrete Continuous Extreme Value model is developed to analyze the dynamics of individuals' modality style. This model enables us to take into consideration marginal rates of substitutions between different transportation modes. Variables of interest in this analysis include the frequency of use of mobility-on-demand (MoD) services as well as the frequency of walking, biking, transit, and auto trips over the course of a month. The results of this study offer city planners and policymakers an opportunity to better understand the factors underlying modality styles, and which priorities to focus on when designing a sustainable development plan for resident-centric Smart Cities. According to the results, age, work status, education, auto availability, and the built environments are among the significant contributors to the modality styles. The results also indicate that the extent of the substitution relationship between transit and MoD services is highly context dependent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]