A GIS toolkit for exploring geographies of household activity/travel behavior

Recent developments in geographic information systems (GIS) and increasing availability of activity/travel micro-data combine to encourage innovation in visualization and exploration of behavioral outcomes of urban processes. Understanding how households and individuals are using cities to conduct their daily activities has important implications for understanding policy response to urban travel reduction strategies. This paper describes a prototype object-oriented, GIS-based system designed to support exploration of household level activity/travel behavior. The capabilities of the system are demonstrated using households from the 1994/1995 Portland Household Activity and Travel Behavior Survey. An illustrative case study demonstrates that exploratory systems of this sort can be useful tools for generating timely activity/travel hypotheses for further study.