Measuring the size and structure of human activity spaces: The longitudinal perspective

Abstract

The complexity of urban mobility and the failure of numerous transport strategies have shown that demand matching transport policies require a deeper analysis of the routines and dynamics of individual travel behaviour. Transportation research has so far mainly focused on the crosssectional analysis of persons and households mobility patterns. In most travel behaviour studies, the main interest has been on differences between travellers or groups of travellers as travelled by easily by one-day or few-days travel diary data. This paper addresses the long-term aspects of spatial mobility. It presents approaches to describe and measure the revealed travel patterns using the address geocodes of the six-week Mobidrive travel survey data. The description and measurement of the observed spatial choice is based on the activity space concept. The availability of the multi-week Mobidrive travel data makes it possible for the first time to measure the extent of individual activity spaces and to test hypotheses about the usage of urban space and the multi-centred structure of our daily life mobility.