Longitudinal analysis of activity generation in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area

Abstract

This paper presents a longitudinal analysis of activity generation behaviour in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) between 1996 and 2016 for various activity types: work, school, shopping, other. The analyses are conducted using the data from the five most recent Transportation Tomorrow Surveys. For work and school purposes, the population is divided into sub-categories considering occupational sectors and educational levels respectively. Further subdivision is made by treating first work/school activity of the day and subsequent work/school activities as distinct activity types. Considerable stability over time in the majority of the model parameters is found in all cases, indicating that both work/school and non-work/school activity episode generation in the GTHA has been very stable over the 20-year period analyzed. Year-specific models and joint models, within which the data are pooled across the years, return very similar results implying that robust joint models that exploit the full time-series of survey data available can be constructed. While first-trips to work and post-secondary schools in the day can be parametrically modelled with reasonable fits, second/subsequent work/school activities and non-work/school activities display considerable randomness in occurrence. Elementary and secondary school trips generally need only be modelled using average trip rates across the student population: parametric, utility-based models provide very little additional explanatory power. In addition, investigation of survey design biases shows that there is no significant survey design effect on activity/trip generation for the first work/school-related activities, however, the models reveal significant biases when the subsequent work/school-related activities and non-work/school activities are analyzed.