Travel Time Use Over Five Decades

Chen Song and Chao Wei
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Chen Song: Department of Economics/Institute for International Economic Policy, George Washington University

Working Papers from The George Washington University, Institute for International Economic Policy

Abstract: In this paper, we use five decades of time use surveys, including the annual American Time Use Survey between 2003 and 2013, to document travel time uses in the aggregate and across demographic groups. We find that total travel time features an inverted-U shape over time, registering a 20 percent increase from 1975 to 1993, but an 18 percent decline from 1993 to 2013. We find that demographic shifts explain around 45 percent of the increase in total travel time from 1975 to 1993. Increases in educational attainment alone contribute to around 28 percent of the increase. Demographic shifts play a much smaller role in the evolution of total travel time afterwards. From 2003 to 2013 the shift of time allocation from travel-intensive non-market work to travel-non-intensive leisure accounts for around 50 percent of the decline in total travel time.

Keywords: Travel time use; Time use survey; Market work; Non-market work; Leisure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 J22 R41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 65 pages
Date: 2015-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma, nep-tre and nep-ure
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http://www.gwu.edu/~iiep/assets/docs/papers/2015WP/SongWeiIIEPWP201519.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Travel time use over five decades (2018)
Working Paper: Travel Time Use Over Five Decades (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gwi:wpaper:2015-19

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