National travel surveys capture travel behaviors, patterns, and trends of inhabitants of their respective nations, and are valuable tools for transportation planning, modeling of travel demand and transportation impacts, analysis of transportation systems, and development of efficient transportation policies. This study utilizes national travel surveys of three nations to compare and analyze travel behavior and trends across the three of them. Great Britain (GB) conducted the very first travel survey in 1965, and the United States (US) and New Zealand (NZ) followed suit in 1969 and 1989, respectively. The main purpose of this research is to compare travel behaviors across these three nations. This analysis was conducted for each of the three nations’ 2017 travel survey. The examined travel measures include travel activity (trips/person/day), travel distance (miles/person/day), average trip distance (miles/trip), travel time (minutes/person/day), average trip time (min/trip), and modal split. These computed travel measures revealed significant differences between the three nations; for example, GB had the lowest travel activity, and the US had the longest travel distance and time. Additional attributes were collected to capture the demographic and geographic differences between these nations, e.g., population density. Some of the observed travel behavior differences may be attributed to differences in the country sizes, population age distributions, population densities, and transportation mode infrastructure. In addition to these 2017 comparisons, travel trends between 1995 and 2017 were compared for both the US and GB. The analysis revealed additional differences in travel activity trends between these two nations during this time period. This study and these findings indicate the potential benefit of analyzing travel differences between nations to improve our understanding of travel behavior and plan for more sustainable transportation systems.
An Exploratory Comparison of International Travel Behavior Differences: Travel Activity, Travel Time, and Travel Distance in Great Britain, New Zealand, and the United States
International Conference on Transportation and Development 2022 ; 2022 ; Seattle, Washington
2022-08-31
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English
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