To improve the understanding of people’s travel behaviour, the authors re-formulated the 1997/98 NZ (Household) Travel Survey database to link together the trip legs to derive two datasets, one based on “trip chains” and the other on “tours” (beginning and ending at home). While this re-formulation appears straightforward, the authors encountered a number of difficulties in creating definitions and procedures for the treatment of trip chains, tours, main mode and main purpose as researchers use the same terms interchangeably or give them different meanings. This paper explores some of the issues encountered while trying to derive coherent meanings for the terms “trip segment”; “trip chain”; “tour”; “main mode”; and “main purpose.” It then goes on to demonstrate how the definitions are applied by highlighting some results from the re-formulated datasets. (a) For the covering entry of this conference, please see ITRD abstract no. E213716.
Samenvatting