Investigating Travel Behavioral Changes throughout 10 Years: A Case Study on Southeast Michigan

This paper presents a descriptive analysis of travel behavior over 10 years using household survey data collected by the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments (SEMCOG) in 2005 and 2015, respectively. The data used in this work were 12,000 and 6,500 sample sizes for 2005 and 2015, respectively. Generally, results indicated that a 12% reduction in all trip rates occurred during the study period. On the other hand, trip rates for multiple age ranges, including the elderly, increased from 2005 to 2015. Also, the average travel distance for all modes increased during the study period, and transit was mainly used for long travel distances. Also, several spatiotemporal changes in human travel behavior were analyzed using different travel indicators, namely, travel time, trip purpose, travel mode, and travel distance. The analysis results show the change in travel behavior across different counties in the SEMCOG area during the study period. The study indicates that the travel time changes across different travel modes, as well as trip purposes, were influenced by the economic impact changes during the study period. It was found that travel time distributions for most purposes are concentrated on trips of travel time shorter than 40 min.