Trip chaining of bicycle and car commuters: an empirical analysis of detours to secondary activities

Abstract

A largely overlooked mode choice factor of cycling is the mode-dependent capability of visiting several activity locations within a trip chain. Due to the bicycle’s limited reach in comparison to the car, this capability can be increased by urban environments that facilitate trip chaining by bicycle. In the present paper, we empirically study travel distances between activity locations that facilitate trip chaining by the example of Dutch commute tours. More precisely, we address the question of how much cyclists extend commute tour distances compared to car travellers to include a secondary activity. For this purpose, a Bayesian regression model is proposed to analyse the effects of travel mode, secondary activity type and a series of control variables such as age and time of the day on commute tour extensions. The model results propose that people make on average detours of 7.4 km by car and 1.3 km by bicycle. These values strongly differ depending on the type of secondary activity, gender, the distance of the home-work tour and the duration of the secondary activity. In addition, the comparison between car and bicycle travel revealed some behavioural peculiarities of the active modes, which have implications for bicycle-friendly urban planning and several transport-related concepts.

KEYWORDS:

• Trip chaining
• commuting
• accessibility
• travel behaviour
• bicycle
• car

Acknowledgement

The data was made available by the Netherlands Mobility Panel administered by KiM Netherlands Institute for Transport Policy Analysis. The authors would like to acknowledge the fruitful discussion on statistical methods with Alexandra Gavriilidou (Department of Transport & Planning, Delft University of Technology) and Rense Nieuwenhuis (Swedish Institute for Social Research, Stockholm University).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Allegro project (no. 669792), which is financed by the European Research Council and the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions.