Quantifying the Spatial Burden of Informal Ride Provision for Older Adults Using Activity Space Analysis and GIS

Older adults’ well-being is strongly shaped by their capacity to navigate and access places beyond their immediate surroundings. Lack of adequate transportation can limit their access to health care, services, and social opportunities. For older adults in the United States who do not or no longer drive, getting private automobile rides from others is their primary mode of transportation, but this reliance can burden their ride providers. Measuring and assessing the geospatial burden of providing rides is important for research and policies that aim to address both negative effects for ride providers and older adults’ unmet travel needs. In this manuscript, we propose an approach that collects data to assess ride providers’ geospatial activity spaces for their own routine activities and for providing rides. By comparing the two activity spaces, we propose a method to operationalize geospatial ride-providing burden, using three potential burden indicators. Using data from an exploratory study (N = 12 ride providers), we apply these burden indicators and correlate them to other indicators of burden (i.e., days/month giving rides, monetary costs, missed work, increased stress). We conclude that the share of the activity space for providing rides falling beyond the area of the ride provider’s routine personal travel (what we call Burden Indicator B) may be a useful indicator of geospatial burden of providing rides.