In the United States, research reveals that women tend to travel shorter distances and durations compared to men. They also often have more complex travel patterns as they balance work and household responsibilities. This distinct travel behavior creates mobility challenges that can limit women’s access to resources and opportunities. Recently, several forward-thinking California transportation agencies have started efforts to gain a better understanding of women’s travel needs. They aim to implement services and policies that cater to these needs. However, existing analyses are often limited in scope, and as a result, they underestimate the intricacies of women’s travel patterns.

This project will analyze gender-related differences in the complexity of daily travel patterns in California. The analysis will rely on data from the California add-on to the 2017 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS), which includes information about all trips, modes of transportation, and purposes within a single travel day. The research will specifically focus on three aspects of complexity: i) trip complexity, which measures the number of linked destinations in a chain of trips; ii) modal complexity, which evaluates the number of different transportation modes used; and iii) spatial complexity, which assesses the geographic extent of the activity space. The study will quantify travel complexity, investigate the connection between complexity and gender, and estimate how gender relates to the key factors influencing these outcomes, such as race, income, household structure, and the presence of children. The findings from this research can provide valuable insights to transportation agencies currently involved in gender-inclusive planning efforts. Additionally, this data may justify greater attention to gender-related issues among California’s transportation agencies and organizations.

While many aspects of life have largely returned to pre-pandemic patterns as the COVID-19 pandemic has become endemic, several aspects of travel remain unsettled and uncertain. In particular, the forced experiment of working from home for at least half of the labor force in 2020 is evolving into a new normal where perhaps a third of all workers split their work hours between office and home. This has had especially significant effects on public transit, which has traditionally carried a disproportionate share of commute trips, but these new work patterns have affected the timing and character of many other trips as well. These evolving patterns of travel may call into question many current transportation policies and plans that are premised on (now) outdated ideas about travel.

This project builds on recent projects examining: (1) research on telecommuting and travel and (2) data from the company StreetLight Data for the Southern California Association of Governments region on the shifting timing of trip-making and its implications for public transit demand. This project considers the shifts in the patterns of trip purposes and their implications for traffic and travel. For example, fewer commute trips mean fewer opportunities to combine shopping and other errands with trips to and from work. Instead, workers may be more likely to take breaks during their workdays to run errands and grocery shop. This may mean that peak hour congestion will be lower (due to fewer commute trips and to fewer errands as part of those commute trips), but more vehicle travel (due to more freestanding trips from home and less trip chaining). Such shifts, if borne out by the data, have implications for efforts to reduce both congestion (good) and increase vehicle travel (bad), and those results inform policy making in this regard.