Activity-Travel Rescheduling Decisions: Estimating Parameters of Response Patterns

Re-scheduling of daily activities and associated travel in response to unforeseen events such as travel delays is receiving increasing attention in the context of traffic management. In this paper, we describe the results of a stated adaptation experiment held among a large sample of individuals through a web-based questionnaire, to estimate parameters of such dynamic behavior. In the experiment, subjects indicate their response to a reduction in available time for a planned activity in a number of hypothetical situations. We estimate subjective preferences for adapting in certain ways conditional upon activity attributes and socio-economic variables using a logit-based analysis. The results indicate that location and transport-mode adaptations are rare compared to duration adjustment or postponing/canceling the activity, dependent on the relative size of reduced time. Socio-economic variables and activity attributes play a significant role too.