Activity-travel patterns of workers and students: a study from Calicut city, India

Abstract

Travel behaviour studies in activity-based perspective treat travel as a result of individual’s desire to participate in different activities. This approach is more significant in the context of developing countries, as the transportation problems are more severe here. Since, commuters contribute to a major share in the travel, understanding their travel behaviour is essential. This paper aims to explore the travel behaviour of commuters in Calicut city, Kerala State, India and thereby model their activity-travel patterns. Household, personal and activity-travel information from 12920 working people and 9684 students formed the database for this study. The data collection was performed by means of home-interview survey by face-to-face interview technique. From preliminary analysis, several simple and complex tours were identified for the study area. Working people’s work participation and students’ education activity participation decision are modelled as mandatory activity participation choice in a binary logit modelling framework. Results of this mandatory activity participation model revealed that male workers are more likely to engage in work compared to females. Presence of elderly persons is found to negatively influence the work participation decisions of workers. This may be due to the fact that, work activity may be partially or completely replaced with the medical requirements of the elderly. The chances for work activity participation increase with increase in number of two-wheelers at home. In the case of students, as the education level increases, they are found to be less likely to participate in education activities. Students are observed to follow simple activity-travel pattern. Complex tours are found to be performed by males, compared to females. Activity-travel pattern of the study group are predicted using the developed models. The percentages correctly predicted indicate reasonably good predictability for the models. These kind of studies are expected to help the town planners to better understand city’s travel behaviour and thus to formulate well-organised travel demand management policies.