Determinants of extreme commuting. Evidence from Brussels,Geneva and Lyon

Daily travel time has increased in Europe during the last decade. Some commuters show unusual commuting behaviours, so-called extreme commuting, which is defined as spending more than 100 min commuting a day. This paper aims to explain these commuting patterns from the point of view of the extreme commuters themselves. Based on a qualitative survey conducted in three European regions - Lyon, Brussels and Geneva - among individuals that spend at least two hours a day commuting, this study shows that extreme commuting is determined by complex interplay between the individual's working and private life and issues related to travel. Among our sample, the choice of public transportation modes assisted long-duration commuting. Our results also highlight the paradox that rapid transportation networks are used intensively to allow people to remain rooted — both residentially and socially.     

Commute minimization in the Greater Toronto Area: applying a modified excess commute

Following the excess commuting literature, we develop a benchmark measure of the minimum required commute, conditional on the layout of the specific urban area. Through segmentation of the commuters into those that can be relocated and those that cannot, we try to explain the difference between the minimum required and actual commute. To determine the segmentation of the commuters we make use of a micro-level explanatory model of commuting distance. This micro-level modeling exercise informs a number of excess commuting simulations that address the contribution of certain groups of commuters to total commuting. Findings from the micro-analysis reaffirm similar findings in the literature for other urban areas. The simulation exercise suggests that varied levels of commute savings may result from policy directed at particular commuter groups.     

Is the built-environment at origin,on route,and at destination associated with bicycle commuting? A gender-informed approach

There is limited evidence on the gender differences and location-specific built-environment factors associated with bicycling in Latin American cities. This study aimed to assess commuting in Bogotá by (1) analyzing the gender-specific trend of the standardized number of bicycle commuters during 2005–2017; and (2) assessing the socio-demographic, community, built-environment and natural factors associated with bicycle commuting stratified by gender. This secondary-data analysis included data from the Household Travel Surveys and Multipurpose Surveys to calculate the number of bicycle commuters per habitant from 2005 to 2017 by gender. We assessed the socio-demographic and built-environment factors fitting generalized additive models stratified by gender using the 2015 Household Travel Survey. Although both women and men increased the standardized number of bicycle commuters, male commuters show a steeper trend than women, evidencing the widening gender gap in bicycle commuting over time. Bicycle commuting was negatively associated with household motor vehicle ownership, steeper terrain slope, longer commute distance, and scarce low-stress roads at trip origin and route. Among women, the availability of bike paths at the trip destination was positively associated with bicycling, while age and being a student were negatively associated with bicycling. Among men, living in areas with the lowest socio-economic status was positively associated with bicycling, while having a driver's license and living close to bus rapid transit stations were negatively associated with bicycling. In conclusion, bicycle and transport infrastructure play different roles in commuting by bicycle by gender and trip stages (origin – route – destination).     

Powered-two-wheelers for city commuting: Insight from Australia's three largest capital cities

The journey to work receives a great deal of research attention due to the peak demand on the transport system. Cities are increasingly concerned with managing traffic congestion and reducing pollution and most of the focus of this research has been on cars, public transport, walking and cycling. In contrast, the role of powered two-wheelers (PTWs), including motorcycles and scooters, in commuting has received little attention, particularly in the context of cities in the developed world. This paper provides new insight into commuting by PTW by drawing on census journey to work data from Australia's three largest cities (Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane) combined with an intercept survey of PTW commuters in Melbourne. It explores the extent of, and changes in, PTW commuting as well as the demographics of PTW commuters. While PTWs account for only a small percentage of urban commuting in Australian cities, their use is growing rapidly and there is a concentration of commuting by PTW into city centres. PTW commuters tend to be high-income males in skilled professional and technical professions. The implication of these findings for transport policy are discussed.     

Suburban travelers pressed for time: Exploring the temporal implications of metropolitan commuting in Barcelona

This study explores the multiple temporal dimensions that commuting to a suburban location can have as an intensive and recurrent daily practice. Focusing on the suburban commute to a university campus in the Barcelona Metropolitan Region, a mobility survey is first combined with tracking data to explore the clock-time side of this phenomenon. The manner in which this daily practice is experienced is delved into using in-depth interviews. Results point out that intensive commuting is to be understood both considering its relation with daily travel time and its territorial context. Qualitative analysis shows how these suburban commuters are concerned for time, and presents strategies at different spatial and temporal scales. This paper provides insight to mobility studies by exploring the multidimensional nature of travel time, and to a growing mixed-methods research field by combining traditional and innovative sources.     

Mapping bicycle use and the risk of accidents for commuters who cycle to work in Belgium

This paper explores the spatial patterns of bicycle use for commuting and the risk cyclists run being injured in a road accident when commuting to work in Belgium. Exploratory data analyses suggest that the observed differences in the use of the bicycle to get to work are strongly linked to the urban hierarchy: commuters are more inclined to cycle in cities and specifically in regional towns (with 25 000 to 120 000 inhabitants). In large cities (more than 200 000 inhabitants), less commuting by bicycle takes place. The relationship between bicycle use and the risk of being seriously injured or killed in a road accident is also studied. A cluster analysis confirms that high proportions of commuter cyclists are correlated with low risks of becoming a casualty. It also shows that there are strong spatial differences (regional and between different types of towns) in bicycle use and the risk of an accident. This suggests that cycling policies should be spatially differentiated.     

The jobs–housing relationship and commuting in Beijing,China: the legacy of Danwei

China’s market-oriented reform has not only revitalized the economy but also changed the physical structure of Chinese cities, which used to be largely determined by the socialist Danwei (or work unit) system. In order to understand the impacts of the reform and the influence of Danwei on jobs–housing relationships and commuting behavior, this study investigates whether there are differences in commuting behavior between individuals who live in houses provided by Danwei and those who reside in houses from private market sources in urban China. We apply the structural equations model to investigate the interactions between housing source (from Danwei or not), jobs–housing relationship, transport mode and commuting time in Beijing, the capital city of China. The results show that Danwei housing commuters have shorter commuting trips and higher usage of non-motorized transport mode than those who live in houses from the market sources. This finding implies that the diminishing influence of the traditional Danwei system and the market-oriented reform in urban development may have changed the jobs–housing balance and increased travel demand in Chinese cities.     

Insights into the fairness of cordon pricing based on origin–destination data

Origin–destination data are used to assess the vertical equity effects of a hypothetical road pricing zone in Canada's largest city. The assessment is based on the proportion of morning commuters affected by cordon pricing by virtue of residential location, trip destination, and travel mode. The overall findings for Toronto, Canada show that people with full-time employment and also those from higher income neighborhoods would be most affected by downtown road pricing; and this holds true when the population is broken out by gender, age group, household size and occupational class. The analysis also highlights that professionals, those who live in one- and two-person households, and those who are aged 65 and older would be disproportionately affected; those who work in manufacturing would be less affected. The equity effects of road pricing arise out of the commuting patterns of different sub-populations.     

Evaluating the effects of cashing out employer-paid parking: Eight case studies

California law requires many employers to offer commuters the option to choose cash in lieu of any parking subsidy offered. This report presents case studies of eight firms that have complied with California's cash-out requirement. For the 1,694 employees of the eight firms, the number of solo drivers to work fell by 17 percent after cashing out. The number of carpoolers increased by 64 percent, the number of transit riders increased by 50 percent, and the number who walk or bike to work increased by 39 percent. Vehicle-miles traveled for commuting to the eight firms fell by 12 percent. Carbon dioxide emissions from commuting fell by 367 kilograms per employee per year. The eight firms' spending for commuting subsidies rose by $2 per employee per month because payments in lieu of parking increased slightly more than spending for parking declined. Federal and state income tax revenues increased by $65 per employee per year because many commuters voluntarily traded tax-exempt parking subsidies for taxable cash. Employers praised the cash option for its simplicity and fairness, and said that it helped to recruit and retain employees. The benefit/cost ratio of the eight cash-out programs was at least 4/1. In summary, these eight case studies show that cashing out employer-paid parking can benefit commuters, employers, taxpayers, and the environment. All these benefits derive from subsidizing people, not parking.     

Time-space convergence and urban decentralisation

The phenomenon of time-space convergence (or compression) has been considered to be associated with the technological advances that have shortened our travel time. Advances in transport technology have gradually diminished travel times, and this process has been discussed in the context of international- or national-level transport changes. This paper investigates the changing relationship between space and time at the urban level. The changing relationship between commuting time and distance in the Seoul Metropolitan Area (SMA) is empirically analysed by using the 1990, 1995, 2000 and 2005 two-percent sample data of the Korean Census of Population and Housing. The study results empirically demonstrate the close relationship between the urban decentralisation process and the time-space convergence phenomenon. The key findings of this research are that commuting time per distance unit in the SMA shortened over the 15 years of the study period, and this improvement was greater for longer journeys than for shorter trips. The empirical evidence of this research shows that workers have migrated to faster commuting modes such as car and subway and away from slower modes such as buses, so that commuting time has decreased or remained constant even as commuting distance in the SMA has increased.     

Active commuting in a university setting: Assessing commuting habits and potential for modal change

This paper describes the results of an online survey that examined commuting patterns, potential for change and barriers and motivators affecting transport decisions in a University population (n=1040 students, n=1170 staff). Overall, 21.5% of staff and 46.8% of students at The University of Western Australia regularly used active modes, and potentially an additional 30% of staff and students would switch to active modes. The results suggested that reducing barriers to using active modes, in particular reducing actual and perceived travel time by bus and bicycle would have the greatest impact on commuting patterns. Some policy applications appeared to hold particular promise, including an implementation of a subsidised public transport pass (U-Pass), increased student housing on or near campus, increased cost of parking, and improved bus services and cycle networks.     

Day-to-day variation in excess commuting: An exploratory study of Brisbane,Australia

Commuting patterns where most if not all 'trips are optimised relative to a given distribution of jobs and housing can result in personal and socio-economic benefits. Excess commuting indicators provide useful information for academics and policy analysts to evaluate how the actual commuting pattern deviates from an optimal pattern where commuting costs are minimised. While actual commuting patterns vary from day-to-day, academic researchers have yet to quantify the temporal variation in these indicators over short time periods. This may be due to the lack of available longitudinal data as input for excess commuting indicators. This study shows that new, open and/or big data (NOBD) (e.g. smartcard data) can be exploited to serve as the input for such analysis. In this regard, our study uses half a year's worth of smartcard data from Brisbane, Australia to first derive/aggregate origins and destinations by small areas of the probable commuting trips by transit on all 122 weekdays over the study period. The study quantifies the day-to-day variation in excess commuting indicators for these trips and finds that excess commuting indicators vary considerably from one day to the next. Nevertheless, daily variations occur within a relatively consistent range which can be planned for. Our research suggests that more conscious and systematic utilisation of NOBD could change how commuting flows in cities are quantified, monitored and planned. In addition, with NOBD, we can more efficiently detect daily outliers in commuting patterns.     

Regional labour markets and job accessibility in City Network systems in Germany

Spatial labour markets are subjected to the forces of regional economic activity and competing network effects. Commuting is, therefore, an important equilibrating vehicle in a City Network constellation. Cities act as attractors of commuters, as most economic activity occurs in cities, thus providing a high share of attractive workplaces. Cities that are centrally connected in a network may act as both centripetal and centrifugal forces in the whole system. The present paper focuses on what is named the City Network (CN) approach. A central idea is the accessibility concept, which is interpreted here as the potential of opportunity for interaction, which has a positive impact on economic growth. In our paper, the accessibility concept and the CN concept are linked together by positioning accessibility in the CN system. Since accessibility measures give geographical insights into the distribution of economic activities and the related (dis)equilibrium of regional development patterns, the connection with the labour market is evident, and, therefore, a second focus of our analysis.In an applied setting, our paper aims to investigate spatial accessibility patterns in the main CN in Germany. The 17 districts which belong to the country’s CN were chosen from the 439 German labour market districts on the basis of three criteria: (a) their connection to the high speed railway network; (b) the most accessible districts according to previous results (2002); (c) relevant districts for the German economy. Our applied modelling research concerns home-to-work commuters travelling between the selected districts belonging to the German CN, for both 2003 and 2007. Here, a comparative analysis of the ranking of the most accessible districts - also for different intra-zonal travel times - is carried out in order to map out the changes in accessibility between 2003 and 2007, especially in the light of new high speed connections and commuting flow dynamics.     

Optimizing EV-based P&R subsidy policies for commuting corridor based on cross-nested logit model

The promotion of electric vehicles (EVs) is restricted by cruising range limitation and charging station deficiency. Given the mature development of Park and Ride (P&R) mode, which is used in many cities worldwide to attract more travelers to use public transit, a new travel mode, i.e., EV-based P&R is introduced as an alternative for commuters’ daily travel. This seems quite attractive to expand the use of EVs and further increase their market share. This paper aims to investigate the impact of EV-based P&R introduction on travel mode choice along commuting corridor, and further aid in the optimal subsidy policies decision for the government. A bi-level model is proposed to model the presented problem. The lower level describes commuters’ joint mode and transfer choice behavior through a cross-nested logit (CNL) model, while the upper level minimizes the system cost. A genetic algorithm is developed to solve the formulated model with a partial linearization algorithm for solving the lower level model. And a numerical example is then used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the methodology and illustrate how the network flow pattern reshapes due to the introduction of EVs into the P&R mode and the change of corresponding subsidy policies. As the results show, improving the EV hardware, applying the intelligent supporting service system, developing new technologies for EV fast charging, appropriately improving the parking space capacity, and increasing the parking fee of transfer stations near the central business district (CBD) are all helpful to save the social cost and promote the usage of EVs.     

Commute mode diversity and public health: A multivariate analysis of 148 US cities

Urban sprawl has a negative relationship with regional health outcomes, such as high obesity and chronic diseases related to physical inactivity. At the same time, literature has shown that walkable built environments are connected to lower obesity rates and increased physical activity. Less understood is the association of modal diversity with those health outcomes. This research studies a range of public health outcomes to determine their associations with commute mode diversity. Researchers adapted the methodology of urban sociologists Harvey Molotch and Richard Appelbaum to explore twelve different health measures in 148 US counties and their metropolitan statistical areas. The test measure is the percentage of commuters who use some means other than a single-occupant vehicle (SOV). The percentage of such commuters ranges from as low as 11% in Houston County, Alabama to as high as 36% in Honolulu County, Hawaii. Using bivariate and multivariate analyses, we found better health outcomes in counties and metropolitan areas that have fewer workers commuting by SOV. These findings underscore the positive impact of sustainable transportation policies on community health and open up a new direction for public health research and the built environment.     

Modal choice and modal change: the journey to work in Britain since 1890

The paper uses 1834 individual life histories to examine changes in journey to work transport modes in Britain since 1890, and 90 in-depth interviews to investigate modal choice amongst commuters since the 1930s. There have been three main periods of change in the transport mode used for commuting, but there has also been considerable inertia in individual modal choice. The reasons why people use particular forms of transport have been quite stable over time, with some long-established differences between men and women. It is suggested that such trends have implications for the formulation of present-day transport policy.     

Near “real-time” estimation of excess commuting from open-source data: Evidence from China's megacities

Urban commuting has continuously fascinated scholars and decision-makers. As few people live and work in the same place, there is always excess commuting (i.e., the non-optimal or surplus work travel occurring in cities because people do not minimize their journeys to work for most residents). Traditional commuting data sources (e.g., questionnaires and census surveys) are challenged by small samples, high cost, and low spatiotemporal resolution. In contrast, the big social-sensing data (e.g., smart card and mobile phone data) only consider one or two traffic mode of a route, which is not consistent with the real-life condition. This article proposes a framework for modeling excess commuting based on open-source data of the ten most populous megacities in China. We downloaded residential points of interest (POIs) from Lianjia Real Estate website and obtained workplace POIs from China's AMAP, which is widespread used as Google map. The stratified sampling approach was employed to derive commuting pairs. Both commuting distance and time were obtained by the shortest path under public transportation from AMAP. Then, the linear programming method was employed to calculate the theoretical minimum commuting time and distance of each city. We analyzed the statistical property and spatial distributions of excess commuting and found that (1) commuting distances and time (ranging from 9.1 to18.1 km and from 44.8 to 74.3  minutes) of all ten megacities follow a left-skewed normal distribution; (2) in terms of commute cost, all cities show universal core-periphery patterns where the spatial heterogeneity of the commuting time is more significant than that of distance; (3) for each city, the excess commuting measured by time (i.e. from 0.61 to 0.79) is lower than that measured by distance (i.e. 0.68 to 0.89); and (4) the role of mixing land use, waterbody distribution, and centripetal urbanization on urban commuting distance and time is significant.     

Impact of the jobs-housing balance on urban commuting in Beijing in the transformation era

This empirical study examines the impact of the jobs-housing balance on individual commuting time in Beijing in the period of transformation of the Chinese economy and society. The results of the analysis show that the jobs-housing balance has a statistically significant association with a worker’s commuting time when the factors of transport accessibility, population density and worker’s socioeconomic characteristics are controlled. The higher the jobs-housing balance, the shorter the worker’s commuting time. The finding suggests that the jobs-housing balance still has significant implications for commuting time, although the recent market-oriented reforms in housing are changing the jobs-housing balance in the danwei system that prevailed in the socialist era. As the housing markets are imperfect, with strong government intervention in Beijing, the finding implies that the co-location hypothesis - which believes development management would create ‘barriers’ to a jobs-housing balance and increase commuting time - needs to be rethought before it can be generalized and applied to China’s cities. The results of the analysis also show that the workers living in danwei housing still have shorter commuting time. The finding indicates that the housing marketization is likely to induce a local jobs-housing imbalance and thereby increase commuting time. In this sense, a deterioration in the jobs-housing imbalance and increased commuting time in Beijing may owe much to the adoption of market-based housing supply.