Long Distance Travel and Destination Attractiveness

Research Team: Konstadinos Goulias (lead), Adam W. Davis, and Elizabeth C. McBride

UC Campus(es): 

Additional Research Partners: UC Santa Barbara

Problem Statement: A substantial amount of Vehicle Miles Travelled (VMT) is long distance travel. This needs to be accounted for when assessing the success of the Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act of 2008 (Senate Bill 375).

Project Description: This project reviews what is known from the literature about long distance travelers, analyzes the contents of the long distance travel log of the California Household Travel Survey (CHTS), demonstrates the augmentation of the trip/tour records with destination attractiveness indicators, derives prototypical traveler profiles, and provides a detailed analysis of long distance tours. The results from this project show that long-distance tours for vacation, business travel, medical, and shopping are substantially distinct in terms of their travel characteristics and correspond to different combinations of other activities in the tour and they are done by different types of households. The methods used here to identify the typology of long distance travel can be easily expanded to include a variety of other explanatory variables of this type of behavior in more focused data collection settings.

Status: Completed

Budget: $33,000