Analysis of Children’s After-school Activity and Travel Patterns

(PI: Chandra Bhat)

Children’s after-school travel needs affect the travel patterns of other family members and contributes to the peak in trips during the afternoon period. However, there are very limited number of studies that focus on examining these activity-travel patterns and the factors that affect children’s after-school time-use. The focus of this project was to understand children’s after-school activity-travel patterns, and the inter-relationships between the activity-travel patterns of children and other members in the household. The research employed a comprehensive descriptive and econometric modeling framework that took into account all dimensions characterizing the context of activity participations. These included the temporal (time-of-day and participation duration), spatial (location), with-whom (i.e., accompanying individuals), and episode sequencing dimensions. The framework also considered various factors affecting children’s activity and travel participation including individual demographics, household demographics, neighborhood demographics, land-use variables, transportation network attributes, and characteristics of the week day.

Keywords: Children, activity-based travel modeling, activity-travel patterns, travel behavior