Capturing Human Activity Spaces

“Activity space,” defined as the local areas within which people move or travel during the course of their activities during a specified time period, is a measure of an individual's spatial behavior that captures individual and environmental differences and offers an alternative approach to studying the spatial reach of travelers. The shape and the area of activity space are a product of how it is conceptualized and measured. This paper enlarges the set of geometries that can be used to describe activity space. It tests four parametric geometries (ellipse, superellipse, Cassini oval, and bean curve), which are identified as those capturing a specific share of all locations visited (i.e., 95%) while minimizing the area covered. They are estimated for a number of long-duration data sets while distinguishing among trip purposes. This paper presents a flexible, easily adaptable method for calculating activity spaces of different shapes and a qualitative comparison of the four shape types on the basis of the given surveys. The choice of an appropriate shape representing an individual's activity space is highly dependent on the spatial distributions and frequencies of the locations visited by the person in the given time period.

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