An analysis of weekly out-of-home discretionary activity participation and time-use behavior

Activity-travel behavior research has hitherto focused on the modeling and understanding of daily time use and activity patterns and resulting travel demand. In this particular paper, an analysis and modeling of weekly activity-travel behavior is presented using a unique multi-week activity-travel behavior data set collected in and around Zurich, Switzerland. The paper focuses on six categories of discretionary activity participation to understand the determinants of, and the inter-personal and intra-personal variability in, weekly activity engagement at a detailed level. A panel version of the Mixed Multiple Discrete Continuous Extreme Value model (MMDCEV) that explicitly accounts for the panel (or repeated-observations) nature of the multi-week activity-travel behavior data set is developed and estimated on the data set. The model also controls for individual-level unobserved factors that lead to correlations in activity engagement preferences across different activity types. To our knowledge, this is the first formulation and application of a panel MMDCEV structure in the econometric literature. The analysis suggests the high prevalence of intra-personal variability in discretionary activity engagement over a multi-week period along with inter-personal variability that is typically considered in activity-travel modeling. In addition, the panel MMDCEV model helped identify the observed socio-economic factors and unobserved individual specific factors that contribute to variability in multi-week discretionary activity participation.

Kay W. AxhausenEmail:

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Erika Spissu   is currently a Research Fellow at the University of Cagliari (Italy). She received her Ph.D. from the University of Palermo and University of Cagliari (Italy) in Transport techniques and economics. She spent the past 2 years at the University of Texas at Austin as a Research Scholar focusing primarily in activity-based travel behavior modeling, time use analysis, and travel demand forecasting. Abdul Rawoof Pinjari   is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of South Florida, Tampa. His research interests include time-use and travel-behavior analysis, and activity-based approaches to travel-demand forecasting. He has his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. Chandra R. Bhat   is a Professor in Transportation at The University of Texas at Austin. He has contributed toward the development of advanced econometric techniques for travel behavior analysis, in recognition of which he received the 2004 Walter L. Huber Award and the 2005 James Laurie Prize from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), and the 2008 Wilbur S. Smith Distinguished Transportation Educator Award from the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE). He is the immediate past chair of the Transportation Research Board Committee on Transportation Demand Forecasting and the International Association for Travel Behaviour Research. Ram M. Pendyala   is a Professor of Transportation Systems in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University. He teaches and conducts research in travel behavior analysis, travel demand modeling and forecasting, activity-based microsimulation approaches, and time use. He specializes in integrated land use—transport models, transport policy formulation, and public transit planning and design. He is currently the Vice-Chair of the International Association for Travel Behavior Research and is the immediate past chair of the Transportation Research Board Committee on Traveler Behavior and Values. He has his PhD from the University of California at Davis. Kay W. Axhausen   is a Professor of Transport Planning at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich. Prior to his appointment at ETH, he worked at the Leopold Franzens University of Innsbruck, Imperial College London and the University of Oxford. He has been involved in the measurement and modelling of travel behaviour for the last 25 years, contributing especially to the literature on stated preferences, microsimulation of travel behaviour, valuation of travel time and its components, parking behaviour, activity scheduling and travel diary data collection.