Presentation from the International Association for Time Use Research (IATUR), Åbo Akademi University, University of Turku, Finland, 30 July – 1 August 2014.
Abstract: Mobility is well understood to be a ‘derived’ demand or an enabler of activities. There is much literature in the field of travel studies to understand the daily mobility patterns of single journey purposes such as commuting or travelling to school using data from activity and travel diary surveys. Much less is understood about the role of mobility in the performance of strings of activities throughout the day. This paper applies a practice theory approach to understand the sequencing of activities and the degree to which travel is involved in them. The aim is to present a method for the identification of ‘practices’ from the flows of activities in time-use data (where does one practice start, and another one stop?) and to characterise these practices in terms of their mobility intensity. Different parameters of intensity will be proposed relating to the likelihood that mobility occurs as part of the practice, the temporal and spatial intensity of the mobility component, plus other characteristics of the travel such as mode use, social context and weekly rhythm. This analysis will be achieved using sequential pattern mining and clustering tools off ered by Visual-TimePAcTS software developed by Ellegård and Vrotsou (2006) and Vrotsou (2010) applied to UK Time Use data (ONS 2000). We present the challenges involved in searching for patterns in the data and conclude with an assessment of the utility of identifying activity sequences with diff erent mobility intensity characteristics as an aid to understanding the daily dynamics of some key practices.
*University of Aberdeen, UK, **Linköping University, Sweden