Incorporation of Escorting Children to School in Modeling Individual Daily Activity Patterns of Household Members

Abstract

Escorting children to school is a common travel arrangement in a household with schoolchildren. This escorting task affects travel patterns of the adult household members as accommodations are made for dropping children off at school or picking them up or doing both. Approaches to modeling joint travel arrangements between adults and children with respect to escorting have been previously suggested. However, examples of implementing such models in the framework of an operational activity-based model (ABM) are limited. This paper focuses on the explicit modeling of the escorting of children to school by adults and takes into account the possible bundling of escorting tasks in households with multiple children. The developed model is part of the regional ABM system currently being developed for the Maricopa Association of Governments in Arizona. Such a model allows for constraining the travel schedules of workers who tend to escort children on their way to and from work. Escorting has important policy implications because workers who escort children to and from school are very restricted in changing their departure times to and from work and in switching to transit; these restrictions are not evident otherwise. A choice model was formulated and estimated for each household by outbound (to school) and inbound (from school) escorting needs that were dependent on the number of schoolchildren, options of bundling children for escorting on one tour, and number of available chauffeurs in the household.