Abstract Manager

As most conventional practical travel models are 4-step trip-based models, travel diary data has almost been analyzed as separate trips rather than studying the travel activity as tours (or half-tours), leading to challenges in accurately forecasting Non-Home Based (NHB) trips, as they are not tied to a “production zone.”  Tour or half-tour based models avoid this problem as the non-home based trips can usually be redefined as stops along a tour, which does have a home anchor.

Trip records from the 2016 Toronto Tomorrow Survey (TTS) data were processed and converted into tour records.  The most notable change occurs as Non-Home Based (NHB) travel is eliminated, with NHB trips mostly folded into work tours.  Stop propensity varies by purpose with school tours having the highest share of simple (0-stop) tours and shopping tours are the most complex. This matters because transit is the chosen mode less on complex tours, particularly when stop-making is on the outbound leg. 

The project further explores the implications of simple vs. complex tours when looking at travel patterns made by females compared to men.  Women make more complex trips by men, across the board, even after controlling for tour purpose, travel mode, number of household vehicles and household income levels.  The most likely explanation of this difference is that women are carrying out additional activity to fulfill household needs, particularly shopping and escorting children.  This additional household maintenance has been termed “pink tax” by researchers.  Women who are making more complex tours are in turn less likely to travel using transit.  After controlling for tour complexity, however, women take transit more than men.  It is possible that women’s overall transit usage would be slightly higher still if they made fewer stops and thus increased the percentage of tours that were simple tours to the same percentage made by men. 

Without examining travel behaviour joined up as tours, these gendered patterns could not be uncovered.  One of the biggest challenges for travel modellers is to determine if these gendered patterns will persist.  There is considerable speculation on whether increased telework levels, which itself has a gendered aspect with women strongly preferring to retain the flexibility associated with teleworking, will persist and what that might mean for overall tour complexity in the future.  Future releases of travel diary data must be studied at the tour level with a gender lens in order to answer these questions.