Changes in travel mode use after residential relocation: a contribution to mobility biographies

In recent years, a growing body of research has been emerging that focuses on changes in travel behaviour over an individual’s life course. It has been labelled the ‘mobility biographies approach’ and highlights changes in travelling induced by key events and experiences in an individual’s life course. In this context residential relocation plays an important role. This paper examines changes in travel mode use after residential relocations using structural equation modelling. It draws on retrospectively recorded empirical data collected in the region of Cologne. The findings show that relocations and associated changes in the built environment induce significant changes in car ownership and travel mode use and thus may be regarded as key events in an individual’s mobility biography. Changes in levels of satisfaction with attributes of the built environment have a significant impact in this context as well. The causal direction of the changes fulfils expectations: suburbanisation is followed by increases in car use and decreases in public transport use, bicycle use and walking. The opposite is true for relocations into the city. In addition, changes in household structure that tend to go along with relocation have significant effects. The findings provide further evidence for the built environment having a causal impact on mode use: modal changes temporally follow changes in the built environment and thus appear to be adjustments to the new spatial setting.     

The role of parents’ mobility behavior for dynamics in car availability and commute mode use

Transportation - Recent studies have analyzed travel behavior over the life course through the lens of the mobility biography approach. Similarities in the effects of certain key events on travel...     

Travel mode choice: affected by objective or subjective determinants?

This contribution presents theoretical considerations concerning the connections between life situation, lifestyle, choice of residential location and travel behaviour, as well as empirical results of structural equation models. The analyses are based on data resulting from a survey in seven study areas in the region of Cologne. The results indicate that lifestyles influence mode choice, although slightly, even when life situation is controlled for. The influence of life situation on mode choice exceeds the influence of lifestyle. The influence that lifestyle, and in part also life situation, has on mode choice is primarily mediated by specific location attitudes and location decisions that influence mode choice, respectively. Here objective spatial conditions as well as subjective location attitudes are important.

Gender structures in car availability in car deficient households

This paper studies the intra-household allocation of cars in car deficient households from a gender perspective. An individual’s car access is measured in terms of duration of car use over a week. Car deficient households are defined as households with fewer cars than drivers. We develop a set of hypotheses that serve to explain gender differences in car availability, and empirically test some of these hypotheses by using multiple regression analysis. The data we use is the German Mobility Panel 1994–2008. Our findings provide evidence for the importance of social roles and economic power in intra-household negotiations about the limited resource of the household car. We cannot clearly decipher whether patriarchal structures and/or gender preferences are relevant as well, but our data suggest that both may play a role.     

Women’s complex daily lives: a gendered look at trip chaining and activity pattern entropy in Germany

It has long been argued in feminist studies that women’s daily lives are more complex than men’s. This is largely due to the gendered division of work, according to which women juggle more varied obligations, including employment, household work and caregiving. Complex activity patterns in turn encourage women to organise their trips in a more efficient manner in trip chains. This paper studies the complexity of activity patterns (measured by Shannon entropy) and trip chaining patterns from a gender specific perspective. The data used is the German Mobility Panel 1994–2012 which records respondents’ trips over the period of a week. The outcome variables are regressed on sociodemographics, residential and workplace spatial context attributes, cohort and period effects. Gender differences in the effects of variables are tested using interaction terms. The results suggest that women’s patterns are more complex than men’s. Some effects differed distinctly between men and women, suggesting that men and women are differently affected by circumstances impacting the complexity of their lives, most notably by having children and by having a partner.