Intra-destination travel behavior of alpine tourists: a literature review on choice determinants and the survey work

Transportation - In the face of a continuous increase in the number of tourists in the Alps, the associated traffic volumes, and the resulting negative externalities, there is an urgent need to...     

A complex network approach to understand commercial vehicle movement

We introduce complex network analysis and use a commercial vehicle’s observed trip as a proxy for a business relation between two facilities in its activity chain. We extract facility locations by applying density-based clustering to GPS data of commercial vehicle activities. The network among the facilities is then extracted by analysing the activity chains of more than 25,000 commercial vehicles. Centrality metrics prove useful and novel in identifying and locating key logistics players. Transport planners and decision makers can benefit from such an approach as it allows them to design more targeted initiatives and policy interventions.     

Household Mobility Tool Ownership: Modeling Interactions between Cars and Season Tickets

This paper moves beyond traditional models of car ownership in that we propose a framework for modeling household-level decisions to acquire specific types and numbers of mobility tools to fulfill the mobility needs of household members. The framework is applied to a data set collected during the winter and spring of 2000/2001 in the German city Karlsruhe via an interactive web-based stated response survey in which respondents could optimize their household mobility tool sets through on-line feedback concerning the estimated costs of the sets. In our analysis, bivariate ordered probit models are estimated for three combinations of mobility tools: season tickets (i.e., transit passes) and cars, season tickets and small cars and season tickets and large cars. In all instances, strong substitution effects are found – that is, as the number of season tickets increases, the number of cars decreases. This finding underscores the need to move beyond simple models of car ownership to comprehensive models of mobility tool ownership. As demonstrated by our research, failure to do so is likely to lead to biased results.     

Interdependencies between turning points in life and long-term mobility decisions

Turning points in life include important personal and familial events as well as changes in the places of residence, education and employment. The latter usually involve alterations in the spatial distribution of activities and, hence, in the activity space, thereby also influencing the daily travel behavior. In this context, the ownership of mobility tools, such as cars and different public transport season tickets, also plays an important role, since people commit themselves to particular travel behaviors as they trade large one-time costs for a low marginal cost at the time of usage. At the same time, decisions concerning mobility tool ownership have lasting effects, as have the decisions concerning location choices. A longitudinal perspective on the dynamics of these long-term mobility decisions is available from people??s life courses, which link different dimensions of life together. In order to study these dynamics and the influence of turning points in life, a longitudinal survey covering the 20?year period from 1985 to 2004 was carried out at the beginning of 2005 in a stratified sample of municipalities in the Zurich region, Switzerland. The paper describes the data collection and then presents results which show that there exist strong interdependencies between the various turning points and long-term mobility decisions during the life course, as events occur to a great extent simultaneously. Persons tend to aim for compensation between the different dimensions of life.     

Post-Car World: data collection methods and response behavior in a multi-stage travel survey

Transportation - The main research question addressed by this study is to what degree individuals would change travel modes, time allocation and activity patterns after experiencing large changes...     

Inertia effects of past behavior in commuting modal shift behavior: interactions,variations and implications for demand estimation

Transportation - This paper focuses on empirically investigating the inertia effects of past behavior in commuting modal shift behavior and contributes to the current state of the art by three...     

Agent-based model for continuous activity planning with an open planning horizon

The paper proposes the microscopic travel demand model continuous target-based activity planning (C-TAP) that generates multi-week schedules by means of a continuous planning approach with an open planning horizon. C-TAP introduces behavioral targets to describe people’s motivation to perform activities, and it uses a planning heuristic to make on-the-fly decisions about upcoming activities. The planning heuristic bases its decisions on three aspects: a discomfort index derived from deviations from agents’ past performance with regard to their behavioral targets; the effectiveness of the immediate execution; and activity execution options available in the near future. The paper reports the results of a test scenario based on an existing 6-week continuous travel diary and validates C-TAP by comparing simulation results with observed behavioral patterns along several dimensions (weekday similarities, weekday execution probabilities of activities, transition probabilities between activities, duration distributions of activities, frequency distributions of activities, execution interval distributions of activities and weekly travel probability distributions). The results show that C-TAP has the capability to reproduce observed behavior and the flexibility to introduces new behavioral patterns.     

Author Index Volume 30 2003

Authors Index

Author Index Volume 30 2003