Transportation habits: Evidence from time diary data. (June 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Minnen, Joeri; Glorieux, Ignace; van Tienoven, Theun Pieter
• Is Part Of: Transportation research. Volume 76(2015)
• Page Start: 25
• Page End: 37
• Publication Date: 2015-06
• Subjects: Transportation habits -- Daily routine -- Temporal regularity -- Time-use data -- Time-diary; Transportation -- Research -- Periodicals; 388.011
• DOI: 10.1016/j.tra.2014.12.013
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0965-8564

Abstract

Highlights: Habitual behavior is best studied using multi-day time-diary data. Habits exist of regularities in tempo and regularities in timing. Different activities are prone to different forms of habits. Both social indicators and type of activities explain different forms of habits. Abstract: The interdisciplinary Time Use Observatory workshops learned that transportation research and social sciences strive for the same multi-day time-diary data in order to make interferences about human habitual (travel) behavior. It also is learned that when it comes to the mathematics and analytics involved both disciplines are miles apart, though both with founded reasons to do so. In brief, transportation research relies on modeling to make predictions whereas social sciences apply statistics to their data to draw conclusions. In line with the interdisciplinary philosophy of the Time Use Observatory workshops, this contribution aims to communicate 30 years of experience in analyzing time-diary data. To do so, it demonstrates the latter by calculation transportation habits and aims to illustrate that multi-day time-diary data might have some additional benefits for computing temporal regularities. It shows that including a flexible notion of both regular tempo (or recurrence) of activities (e.g. every day) and regular timing of activities (e.g. always at 6 am) produces different results for different kind of transportation purposes. It also shows that these calculations using multi-day time-diary data result in an indicator at the individual level that can be analyzed in terms of socio-demographic and socio-economic characteristics. This work concludes that partitioning temporal regularities in regular reoccurrence and regular timing is a crucial element of (transportation) habits.