Research Note—The Ebb and Flow of Temporary Populations: The Dimensions of Spatial-Temporal Distributions of Daytime Visitors in the Netherlands

Abstract

In a network society, the increasing fragmentation of individual activity and travel patterns has a major impact on visitors' use of places and spaces throughout the day. The aim of this study is to determine the main dimensions underlying diurnal weekday variations in visitor populations in Dutch municipalities, and to identify the salient spatial and transportation-related features of these municipalities that contribute to the dimensions of these temporary populations. Using the 1998 Netherlands National Travel Survey for six representative one-hour time periods, we performed an exploratory factor analysis to capture the underlying dimensions. The solution comprised one dimension referring to participation in activities, two dimensions related to the size of the territory in which visitor populations operate combined with the use of different transport modes, one dimension expressing the direction in which interlocal movement occurs, and three dimensions capturing different life-cycle stages within the visitor population.