Investigating the Factors of Urban Commuters' Activity Pattern Choice from the Perspective of Time Structure-A Case Study of Kunming, China

Understanding the commuters' daily activity chains is important to improve the urban mobility from the demand side. Although several studies have investigated the influence of activity chains, the complex relationships between individual and household characteristic, and the activity chains-related characteristic has not well explained. One crucial research gap in this area is the paucity of the time characteristic of activity chains, and the influencing factors of activity chains are discussed from the perspective of time sociology. This study attempts fill this gap by constructing the activity chains of commuters and using sequence analysis and characteristics in tandem to analyze the differences between the commuters. In total, using the sample data from an activity-travel diary survey conducted in Kunming in 2016, this study exploited the second-order clustering to cluster the commuters' activity chains and obtained three activity patterns, i.e., working-oriented patterns, household-oriented patterns, and recreation-household patterns. Entropy is used as an index to characterize activity patterns, furthermore, multinomial logit model is further built to investigate the relationships between activity patterns and socio-demographics as well as activity chain-related attributes characteristics. The results show that age, gender, education level, the age of child, the distance of job-housing, travel mode, trip frequency and frequency of work activities all significantly impact the activity patterns. The contributions of this study not only lie in offering an effective approach to construct daily activity chains from time structure, but also can help policymakers to improve urban transportation governance effect through adjustment of the time distribution of resources.