Leisure activities play an increasingly dominant role in our daily lives. Their importance has increased steadily over the last 40 years compared with other activities. Considering leisure travel, one would expect to discover this trend in recent empirical work. Unfortunately, this has not been possible in Germany or other countries due to a lack of suitable data. The lack of such data is mainly caused by different leisure activities being performed sporadically, which are influenced by changing conditions such as the weather, traffic, etc. It is thus desirable to obtain data over periods substantially longer than 1 or even several days (longitudinal data). The longitudinal 6-week Mobidrive survey data match this requirement and are analysed here with regards to leisure activities. The Mobidrive data allow the examination of aspects of temporal and spatial variability and separate analyses of distinct detailed leisure activities. Because leisure traffic has been rarely analysed from a longitudinal perspective, it is difficult to generalize the results. For this reason, a similar but outdated dataset (Uppsala dataset) is used to validate the results.

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This paper introduces a new long-duration travel diary survey undertaken in a small town and rural environment, which complements the existing urban Mobidrive survey of 1999. Policy-making is dominated by the 1-day view of the world provided by the usual diaries. Long-duration surveys can balance this by highlighting the strong intrapersonal variance in choices, modes used and other aspects of travel behaviour. They also allow us to gain an understanding of the activity space of the travellers. The new 2003 Thurgau data followed the protocol of the earlier study, but developed the set of questions further. These new questions concerned the social context of respondents as well as trip-related items, such as planning horizon of the activity, previous frequency of visits or the groups involved in the trip or activity. The descriptive and model-based analysis of the data showed that respondent fatigue is not an issue in either survey. Where significant deviations from a steady number of reported trips were found, they showed positive tendencies, i.e. learning. The skill accrued in the intensive round of contacts between respondent and interviewer is significant. Papers on travel diaries tend not to report interviewer effects, although their impacts are clearly discernable. The analysis shows that the four interviewers employed in this survey had a substantial effect on the number of reported trips. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007Fatigue, Mobidrive, Switzerland, Thurgau, Travel behaviour, 6-Week travel diary,

A recent project addressed how travelers would react to fuel prices rising above the high levels that were reached in mid 2008. Study participants were recruited during phone interviews, in the course of which trips made on a specified day were recorded. On the basis of one of those trips and the respondents’ possession of mobility tools, stated preference (SP) experiments were constructed. The first part consisted of a mode choice situation under modified price (and travel time) settings (tactical decisions). The second part focused on long-term (strategic) choices between the current and an alternative fleet, including a redistribution of yearly mileage. From the SP data, multinomial logit models for mode and fleet choice were estimated. The mode choice models were estimated by using income- and distance-dependent nonlinear utility functions and separately for the various trip purposes (as was the practice in earlier Swiss studies on similar topics) and controlled for all relevant trip characteristics. The models for mobility tool ownership, which were formulated by using a new approach, aimed to yield trade-offs between the various attributes of the offered fleets and to forecast the distribution of annual transit passes under modified settings. The findings suggest that inertia is present in both mode choice and mobility tool ownership. Elasticities do not change much from previous studies, where more-conservative price increases were assumed. Transit pass ownership is expected to grow only when increasing fuel prices coincide with stable public transport fares.