Gender and household life cycle together affect daily travel behavior. Although this makes intuitive sense, transportation planners and policy makers have done little to understand what effect and impact these factors have on daily transportation choices. The 1995 Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey was used to examine trip-chaining behavior of adult men and women traveling Monday through Friday. The data show that women continue to make more trips to perform household-sustaining activities such as shopping and family errands to a greater extent than men. Women, especially with children in the household, are more likely to chain these household-sustaining trips to the trip to and from work. Women’s participation in the labor force is at an all-time high, but women’s patterns in travel to work are different from men’s patterns, and they vary with family and life-cycle status. The type and location of jobs that women take are likely affected by their greater household and family responsibilities. The biggest question for the future is whether and how the changes in women’s status in the workplace, and perhaps the concomitant change in the household dynamics and responsibilities, will affect travel behavior of both men and women. These changes will deeply affect the development of programs related to transit, land-use planning, work schedules, telecommuting, and other programs related to automobile use.

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This paper uses data from the 1995 Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey and the 2001 National Household Travel Survey to examine trip-chaining trends in the United States. The research focuses on trip chaining related to the work trip and contrasts travel characteristics of workers who trip chain with those who do not, including their distance from work, current levels of trip making, and the purposes of stops made within chains. Trends examined include changes in the purpose of stops and in trip-chaining behavior by gender and life cycle. A robust growth in trip chaining occurred between 1995 and 2001, nearly all in the direction of home to work. Men increased their trip chaining more than women, and a large part of the increase was to stop for coffee (the Starbucks effect). It was found that workers who trip chain live farther from their workplaces than workers who do not. It was also found that, in two-parent, two-worker households that drop off children at school, women are far more likely than men to incorporate that trip into their commute and that those trips are highly constrained between 8:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m. An analysis was done of workers who stopped to shop and those who did not but made a separate shopping trip from home; a large potential to increase trip-chaining behavior in shopping trips was found. Results of these analyses have important policy implications as well as implications for travel demand forecast model development. Finally, this paper uses these analyses to develop conclusions about the utility of transportation policies and programs that use the promotion of trip chaining as a primary travel demand management strategy.

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An increasing amount of travel, both long- and short-distance trips, is made in private vehicles for recreation. Peak congestion around attractions and leisure spots can be worse than congestion in the city center during peak periods. Moreover, recreational travel within, to, and through metropolitan areas contributes to congestion problems and points to the need for its incorporation into travel forecasting. The importance of leisure travel in state economies raises the question of why this segment of travel is not more often studied. The 1995 American Travel Survey and the 1995 Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey are used to examine the characteristics of recreational trips by private vehicle. Recreational trips by other modes, such as transit and airplane, are not included. Data from the surveys show that private vehicle recreation trips make up about 14 percent of all local trips, 23 percent of all long-distance trips, and 15 percent of total vehicle kilometers traveled on U.S. roads. Recreation trips are not equally distributed among all groups of people, however. African Americans report about half the amount of recreational automobile trips and one-third the average kilometers as whites. Other differences by race or ethnicity indicate that Hispanic families tend to travel in larger groups than African Americans or whites. Age, too, is a determining factor in the amount and type of recreational travel. Both the young and the old make more trips on a daily basis, but they make far fewer long-distance trips than those in middle age.