Defining and understanding trip chaining behaviour

Trip chaining is a phenomenon that we know exists but rarely investigate. This could be attributed to either the difficulty in defining trip chains, extracting such information from travel diary surveys, the difficulty in analysing all the possible trip chain types, or all of the above. Household travel diary surveys provide a wealth of information on the travel patterns of individuals and households. Since such surveys collect all information related to travel undertaken, in theory it should be possible to extract trip-chaining characteristics of travel from them. Due to the difficulty in establishing and analysing all of the possible trip chain types, the majority of research on trip chaining has appeared to focus on work travel only. However, work related travel in many cities does not represent the majority of activities undertaken and, for some age groups, does not represent any travel at all. This paper begins by reviewing existing research in the field of trip chaining. In particular, investigations into the definitions of trip chaining, the defined typologies of trip chains and the research questions that have been addressed are explored. This review of previous research into trip chaining facilitates the following tasks: the identification of the most useful questions to be addressed by this research; defining trip chaining and associated typologies and defining data structures to extract trip chaining information from the household travel surveys conducted in metropolitan Adelaide, South Australia. The definition and typology developed in our research was then used to extract trip-chaining information from the household travel diary survey (MAHTS99) conducted in Adelaide in 1999. The extracted trip chaining information was then used to investigate trip-chaining behaviour by households. The paper reports the results of this analysis and concludes with a summary of the findings and recommendations for further investigations.