Activity-Travel Behavior Analysis

The increasing concern in many urban and suburban areas about the level of traffic congestion, combined with the conceptual deficiencies of the conventional trip-based travel demand modeling approach, has led to the emergence of the activity-based approach to studying travel behavior. The activity-based approach views travel as a derived demand; derived from the need to pursue activities distributed over space. The approach focuses on sequences or patterns of activity behavior, with the whole day or longer periods of time as the unit of analysis. It emphasizes the effects of (and constraints imposed by) economic, gender, social, transportation network, and locational divisions on spatial and temporal aspects of individual movement. The activity-based holistic perspective of travel can reliably evaluate urban travel demand management policies since it explicitly models activity patterns and considers these patterns to be the fundamental influence on travel. The objective of this ongoing research is to contribute toward advancing and operationalizing the activity-based approach by a) Examining and understanding time-use behavior, b) developing a comprehensive representation of attributes characterizing workers’ and non-workers’ daily activity-travel pattern, including linkages between worker and non-worker activity-travel patterns, c) proposing an analysis framework for modeling the activity-travel pattern of individuals based on careful descriptive analysis of data from several metropolitan regions, d) formulating an econometric methodology to estimate the components of the analysis framework, and e) formulating an econometric micro-simulator to predict worker and non-worker activity travel patterns given socio-demographic attributes, land-use characteristics and transportation system attributes.