Contacts and Meetings: Location, Duration and Distance Traveled

Abstract

The role of contacts on travel behavior has been getting increasing attention. This paper reports on data collected on individual’s social meetings and the choice of in-home/out-of-home meeting locations as well as the distance traveled and duration of out-home-meetings and its relationship to the type of contact met and other attributes of the meeting. Empirically we show that in-home meetings tend to occur most often with close contacts and less often with distant contacts. The purpose, meeting day, and household size suggest that leisure, weekend and large household size people tend to have their meetings either at their home or at their contact’s home. In addition when meetings occur outside of the house, the duration is longer for close contacts and distance to the meeting location is directly influenced by duration and indirectly by the relationship type. Overall the paper illustrates that relationship type along with other meeting specific and demographic variables is important in explaining the location, duration and distance traveled for social meetings.

Keywords: travel behavior, social meetings, demographics, transportation

JEL Classification: R40, R41, D71