9: Concepts of Travel Behaviour Research

In the first part this chapter proposes a conceptual framework for travel behaviour research through a definition of the scope of the research topic, essentially human activity schedules, and a conceptualisation of the traveller as a network actor negotiating infrastructure and human networks and dealing with the social content of the activities undertaken. In the second part of the chapter an operationalisation of this framework through the dynamic microsimulation of daily life nested within the microsimulation of longer-term projects and choices.

Travel behaviour research, now about sixty years old, draws for its concepts on a wide range of disciplines and on its own understandings, which are not necessarily consistent with each other, but often either overlay the same term with multiple, divergent meanings, or provide different terms for the same object or process. This is especially true, when one is talking about processes of change at the personal or system level. In addition, the field is tied to its professional forecasting and therefore its modelling remit, which generally leads to confusion between the conceptual understandings in its research domain and the impoverished, truncated, simplified forms these find in the numerical models due to measurement problems, resource availabilities or computational limitations. This conflict will be visible in this discussion as well. The purpose of the chapter is to propose a general conceptual framework for travel behaviour research. It is a starting point for discussion, but hopefully also a kernel around which researchers can start building a common understanding of the dynamics of travel and communication patterns today.