New Approaches to Understanding Travel Behaviour: The Human Activity Approach

Abstract

This chapter discusses the human activity approach to studying travel behaviour. It begins by briefly reviewing the history of human activity research and in the following sections describes how the approach may be used to study travel behaviour, both conceptually and practically. The space-time activity framework described provides a general alternative basis for the study of travel behaviour. The activity-travel framework view people as living on a daily basis by participating in a sequence of activities, in order to satisfy basic needs and less essential preferences. Although undoubtedly a considerable advance, viewed from the perspective of the activity-travel framework the existing disaggregate travel demand models contain a number of fundamental limitations and appear more as a refinement of existing approaches than a radical departure from them. The Transport Studies Unit, Oxford University, have been carrying out studies of travel behaviour using the human activity approach, at both conceptual and empirical levels since late 1974.

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