Model of Simultaneous Travel time and Activity Duration for worker with Transportation Panel Data

Recent world-wide interest in activity-based travel behavior modeling has generated an entirely new perspective on how the profession views the travel demand process. This paper seeks to further promote the case of activity-based travel behavior models by providing some empirical evidence of relationship between travel time and activity duration decision for worker with transportation panel data. The travel time from home to work and from work to home, without activity involvement, is estimated by the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) method. And, the travel time to and from the selected activity and the activity duration are modeled simultaneously by the Three Stage Least Squares (3SLS) method due to the endogenous relationship between travel time and activity duration. Two kinds of models, OLS and 3SLS, include selectivity bias corrections in a discrete/continuous framework, because of the inter-relationship between the choice of activity type/travel mode (discrete) and the travel time/activity duration (continuous). Estimation is undertaken using a sample of over 1300 household two-day trip diaries collected from the same travelers in the Seattle area in 1989. The behavioral consequences of these models provide interesting and provocative findings that should be of value to transportation policy formulation and analysis.