Modelling Discretionary Activity-Travel Patterns of Non-Car Owners

The traditional four-step trip-based travel demand procedure for estimating the Origin-Destination (OD) matrix has long been criticized for its inability to reflect underlying activity behaviour and to be responsive to changing policies regarding the environment, land use, and expansion of transportation infrastructure and services. The call for an activity-based approach is well justified.Numerous attempts have been made to model decision processes in formulating activity-travel patterns. Many of these approaches are very complex and there is always the issue of trade-offs between behavioural realism and complexity. This project aims to develop an integrated and practical system of statistical models that depicts realistically activity-travel behaviour patterns but is still simple enough to be used to predict the discretionary travel demand of non-car owners.