Recurrence of Daily Travel Patterns

Abstract

Multiday travel behavior was examined as a stochastic process, and new empirical findings are offered on the variation of travel patterns from day to day. The analysis was based on data from a 6-week travel diary survey conducted in Germany. A small number of travel pattern classes were identified, and transitions in the patterns over a course of weeks were analyzed with Markov chain models. Transitions from a pattern to itself are frequent, particularly for nonworkers, and indicate that some patterns tend to be pursued for a large number of consecutive days. The study also reveals that individuals are heterogeneous in terms of multiday travel behavior; pattern-to-pattern transition probabilities vary substantially across individuals. Some of the observable heterogeneity is demonstrated in terms of the association between attributes of the individual and the recurrence of daily travel patterns.