Multimodal Trips in the Netherlands: Microlevel Individual Attributes and Residential Context

Abstract

Multimodal passenger transportation has received renewed attention in industrialized countries as a more sustainable and environmentally sensitive alternative to the uncontrolled growth in car travel. As a result there has been a diverse range of policy and planning guidelines supporting, promoting, and evaluating seamless multimodal travel alternatives. Few attempts, however, have been made at quantifying the space-time implications of multimodal transportation on the travel behavior and activity patterns of individuals. This research is concerned with an analysis of multimodal trips to provide insight into the specific travel behavioral and sociodemographic characteristics of multimodal transportation users in the Netherlands. A conceptual overview of multimodal transportation is provided followed by a brief literature review that discusses some relevant research themes relating to multimodal transportation. This conceptual overview is quantified with travel data from the 1998 Dutch National Travel Survey. On the basis of the analysis, conclusions are drawn with regard to the most frequently occurring mode chain combinations, number of trips, trip duration, and mean trip and stage distance. Attention is also paid to each mode’s unique distance decay function for the different stages in a multimodal trip. Finally, a schematic framework of the typical multimodal trip characteristics is provided. The individual level attributes that influence multimodal transportation is explored with multivariate analysis. The results indicate some very distinct person characteristics associated with multimodal transportation.