This paper investigates the relation be ween the growth of mobility and 'task combination' in the Netherlands. Task combination is defined as carrying out more than one job at once, such as combining a job or an education course with domestic work. It is to be expected that this combination of duties increases the need to travel more. Duties are often outdoor and combining them makes personal transport necessary. The investigation is conducted with time budget data. These data have been collected in the Netherlands every five years since 1975. They form a representative and comparable set of time budget data for the Dutch. In every time budget study, over 2.000 respondents recorded more than 200 different kinds of activities every quarter of an hour during a whole week. Using different tests of statistical analyses, the expected relation between mobility and task combination can be clearly shown. On the one hand it is simply an effect of composition: the more persons who combine tasks, the more mobile is the total sample. People who combine tasks have an high average mobility, although this did not increase further between 1975 and 1990. According to expectations, these persons used cars more and more frequently to fulfil their duties. From a collective point of view, the results have uncovered a contradiction in policy goals. On the one hand policy makers want to support emancipation and individual freedom (which leads to task combination), on the other they want to reduce what is the necessary consequence of this: a growth of car use.
Samenvatting