Time-of-Day Choice Modeling for Long-Distance Trips

During the past two decades, increasing attention has been given to incorporating the temporal nature of trip making into the travel demand modeling process. The vast majority of prior studies focused on daily urban trips. This study explores the timing-scheduling decision-making behavior for long, occasional, and exceptional travel, rather than habitual, repetitive trips. A long-distance trip is defined for this study as 50 mi or longer and 60 min or longer one way. An intensive preference survey was conducted to help expose those salient factors that affect time-of-day choice and help understand the prioritization among the variables and constraints. A multinomial logit model was then developed from the 2001 National Household Travel Survey daily-trip survey data. Various trip activity, personal, and household characteristics were examined. The time-of-day choice process for long-distance trips was found to be more complicated than that for daily short trips. Trip duration, activity duration, travel day type, whether traveling with other persons, and the presence of young children all had strong implications for the departure time choice for long-distance trips.