Large scale travel and activity surveys are rarely carried out over a period of many years. The VATS surveys in Melbourne Australia have been done for a total of 9 years, making it the longest running such activity and travel survey currently available. The data for the first six years has recently been reassessed and restructured into a strictly comparable set of six years, and the remaining three are expected to be completed at some point during 2003. It is therefore timely to assess the contribution of such an asset towards understanding activity and behavioural shifts within large metropolitan cities. Comparisons are drawn with a survey that was initiated some years later in Australia's other major city, Sydney, and which is still ongoing. The first six years of the Melbourne survey have been reworked to ensure consistency in the method by which each annual series of data is weighted and expanded to reflect the aggregate behaviour of city's population. It is this reworked dataset that forms the backbone of the analyses presented in this paper, since only with consistency in method and approach is it possible to approach the task of discerning genuine shifts in activity and behaviour with any degree of confidence. Notable among these are the increased mobility and changing lifestyles of women, or at least some subsets of the female population; the increased mobility of young adults; changing activity patterns within the population in response to more liberal opening hours for shops and other urban services; the increased use of public transport for work journeys and among residents in areas well served by public transport (although little overall change in mode share); and changes in the distribution of access to the various transport modes available in Australia's second largest city. For the covering abstract see ITRD E126595.
Samenvatting