What Counts as Commute Travel? Identification and Resolution of Key Issues around Measuring Complex Commutes in the National Household Travel Survey

We use travel diary data from the 2017 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) Georgia subsample to address critical issues associated with analyzing complex work journeys. To define the work journey, we discuss the importance of defining commute anchors by both purpose and location. We then compare two alternate measures for determining what portion of each journey should be counted as commute distance: the last leg of the journey (the NHTS default), and a modeled counterfactual simple commute to estimate the distance that would have been traveled had no stops been made. The average complex commute distance obtained using the counterfactual method was 63% higher than the estimate based on using the last leg alone. Using the last-leg method may understate Georgia’s annual commute distance by 2.6 billion miles (10% of the total, including both simple and complex commutes). We argue that the last-leg method is not an accurate gauge of work travel, particularly among populations such as women, who are more likely to trip chain on their commutes.

Purpose-Based Walking Trips by Duration, Distance, and Select Characteristics, 2017 National Household Travel Survey

Background: New or enhanced activity-friendly routes to everyday destinations is an evidence-based approach for increasing physical activity. Although national estimates for some infrastructure features surrounding where one lives and the types of nearby destinations are available, less is known about the places where individuals walk. Methods: A total of 5 types of walking trips (N = 54,034) were defined by whether they began or ended at home (home based [HB]) and trip purpose (HB work, HB shopping, HB social/recreation, HB other, and not HB trip) (2017 National Household Travel Survey). Differences and trends by subgroups in the proportion of each purpose-oriented trip were tested using pairwise comparisons and polynomial contrasts. Results: About 14% of U.S. adults reported ≥1 walking trip on a given day. About 64% of trips were HB trips. There were few differences in prevalence for each purpose by subgroup. For example, prevalence of trips that were not HB decreased significantly with increasing age and increased with increasing education and household income. Conclusions: Given age-related and socioeconomic differences in walking trips by purpose, planners and other professionals may want to consider trip origin and destination purposes when prioritizing investments for the creation of activity-friendly routes to everyday destinations where people live, work, and play.

Sentiment analysis of popular-music references to automobiles, 1950s to 2010s

In recent years, there has been a scholarly debate regarding the decrease in automobile-related mobility indicators (car ownership, driving license holding, VMT, etc.). Broadly speaking, two theories have been put forward to explain this trend: (1) economic factors whose impacts are well-understood in principle, but whose occurrence among young adults as a demographic sub-group had been overlooked, and (2) less well-understood shifts in cultural mores, values and sentiment towards the automobile. This second theory is devilishly difficult to study, due primarily to limitations in standard data resources such as the National Household Travel Survey and international peer datasets. In this study we first compiled a database of lyrics to popular music songs from 1956 to 2015 (defined by inclusion in the annual “top 40”), and subsequently identified references to automobiles within this corpus. We then evaluated whether there is support for theory #2 above within popular music, by looking at changes from the 1950s to the 2010s. We demonstrate that the frequency of references to automobility tended for many years to increase over time, however there has more recently been a decline after the late 2000s (decade). In terms of the sentiment of popular music lyrics that reference automobiles, our results are mixed as to whether the references are becoming increasingly positive or negative (machine analysis suggests increasing negativity, while human analysis did not find a significant association), however a consistent observation is that sentiment of automobile references have over time become more positive relative to sentiment of song lyrics overall. We also show that sentiment towards automobile references differs systematically by genre, e.g. automobile references within ‘Rock’ lyrics are in general more negative than similar references to cars in other music genres). The data generated on this project have been archived and made available open access for use by future researchers; details are in the full paper.

Fields of Applications and Transport-Related Potentials of Small Electric Vehicles in Germany

The possible applications of small electric vehicles, i.e., electric cargo bikes and three- and four-wheeled L-class vehicles in transport, are discussed, and potential business models are presented. Moreover, transport-related potentials are analyzed. Therefore, we have utilized a multi-method approach: we conducted qualitative interviews with experts and professionals in the field of light and small electric vehicles and carried out quantitative analyses with the national household travel survey mobility in Germany 2017. Our results show that, theoretically, small electric vehicles could be used for 20–50% of private trips (depending on the model). On these trips, however, they would not only replace car trips, but also trips on public transport or by bicycle and on foot. In commercial transport, these vehicles are particularly suitable for service trips and some last-mile deliveries. If small electric vehicles were to replace a significant share of the transport volumes of motorized passenger and commercial transport, they could contribute to climate protection.