Fatigue in long-duration travel diaries

Abstract

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,

Dynamic model of activity-type choice and scheduling

“…The availability of the second half of the Mobidrive data collected in Halle and the more recent 2003 Thurgau survey (Axhausen et al, 2007), raise the question of how stable the parameters and model structure are. We hope to address this question of transferability, or better stability in the future.…”

“…In a more recent work, Pas and Sundar (1995) assess that this variability should have important implications for data collection, model estimation and model interpretation. Data collected over a period of time are still rare, but two recent studies have made available to researchers two continuous surveys on a six-week period (Axhausen and al., 2002;Axhausen et al, 2007) (See Schlich, 2004 for an analysis of the similarity of the activity patterns over time). Longitudinal observations of individual activity behavior allow the estimation of dynamic models.…”

The limits of analyzing service quality data in public transport

“…To avoid the social desirability bias of self-reported measures (Levy 1981;Zerbe and Paulhus 1987), we tracked actual behavior and captured mode choice at the individual level for analyses of relative importance. In accordance with standard practices in public transport research, we surveyed respondents' mobility behavior by asking them to complete a travel diary that listed all of the trips that they had taken in a week (Axhausen et al 2007). Three lengthy telephone interviews were conducted on the first, fourth, and seventh day of the week.…”

On the Treatment of Repeated Observations in Panel Data: Efficiency of Mixed Logit Parameter Estimates

“…seven or more successive days), but the survey is not repeated in subsequent years. Some recent examples of panel data gathered over a continuous period of time are the two-day time-use diary for the US National Panel Study of Income Dynamics (2002) and the six-week travel and activity diary data panels collected in Germany (Axhausen et al, 2002) and Switzerland (Axhausen et al, 2007). One of the most recent panels is that gathered in Santiago (2006Santiago ( -2008, which combines both the "short" and "long" survey panel approaches.…”