Urban Rhythms: Modelling the Rhythms of Individual Travel Behaviour

Abstract

The recent availability of longitudinal data on individual trip making and activity behaviour has enabled analysts to get new insights into the structures and motives of daily life travel. Travel diary data sets such as Mobidrive (six-week continuous travel diary survey) and GPS observations such as Atlanta (up to 2 years of vehicle instrumented GPS monitoring) are exciting sources of information for the description and modelling of the variability of individual travel patterns. The investigation of long-term temporal and spatial phenomena of travel demand is adding to the analysis repertoire of Activity Based Analysis(ABA) which identifies this area as an important issue for research and practice. This thesis picks up two aspects from the wide field ofthe intra-personal investigation of travel behaviour which are the periodicity in activity demand and the long-term structures of destination choice and activity Spaces. These two issues stress the regularity and the stability of day-today travel behaviour which has been often neglected in travel behaviour analysis in favour of the legitimate intention to search for complexity and variability in the first place. The first stream of analysis concentrates on the description of the temporal patterns of activity demand by Survival Analysis techniques such as hazard modeis. The approach which considers parametric as well as non-parametric models is chosen to capture the specific characteristics of interval duration data. The models reveal the effects of socio-economic attributes of travellers on the periodicity of activity execution. The focus of the second stream of analysis is the description and measurement of the spatial distribution of activities. Activity locations which are frequently visited over prolonged periods are structural elements of the activity Spaces which may be understood as a "manifestation of our everyday lives". The thesis develops several measurement approaches which focus on the enumeration and mapping of unique locations and the transformation of point patterns into continuous representations of locational choice. The identification and measurement of revealed individual activity Spaces is believed to increase transport planning's ability to realistically define choice set for destination choice. The analysis is based on a range of individual panel data sets of different data collection methods and survey areas which provides a great variety of behavioural patterns and regional peculiarities. These data sets span the range from rural village and small town (Canton Thirrgau, Switzerland) to metropolitan environments (Copenhagenor Atlanta). The analysis tries to trace the possible impacts of these scale differences. The thesis offers interesting new findings on the motives of recurrent patterns of travel and especially on the longitudinal structures of people's destination choice. A multifaceted and ambiguous character of daily life travel is revealed. Whereas sound routines in time and Space seem to dominate daily life, individuals show a considerable amount of variability, flexibility and variety seeking in travel and activity behaviour. The results have strong implications for further methodological developments in travel behaviour analysis and for the ongoing practitioners' discussion of how to influence people's mobility patterns.