Trip-Chaining Trends in the United States: Understanding Travel Behavior for Policy Making

This paper uses data from the 1995 Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey and the 2001 National Household Travel Survey to examine trip-chaining trends in the United States. The research focuses on trip chaining related to the work trip and contrasts travel characteristics of workers who trip chain with those who do not, including their distance from work, current levels of trip making, and the purposes of stops made within chains. Trends examined include changes in the purpose of stops and in trip-chaining behavior by gender and life cycle. A robust growth in trip chaining occurred between 1995 and 2001, nearly all in the direction of home to work. Men increased their trip chaining more than women, and a large part of the increase was to stop for coffee (the Starbucks effect). It was found that workers who trip chain live farther from their workplaces than workers who do not. It was also found that, in two-parent, two-worker households that drop off children at school, women are far more likely than men to incorporate that trip into their commute and that those trips are highly constrained between 8:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m. An analysis was done of workers who stopped to shop and those who did not but made a separate shopping trip from home; a large potential to increase trip-chaining behavior in shopping trips was found. Results of these analyses have important policy implications as well as implications for travel demand forecast model development. Finally, this paper uses these analyses to develop conclusions about the utility of transportation policies and programs that use the promotion of trip chaining as a primary travel demand management strategy.