ESRC Transport Studies Unit

This paper examines the changes in the individual’s commuting behaviour over time and investigates some of the factors influencing these changes. Specifically, we are interested in the impact on commuting mode and commuting time of changes in home and workplace location, i.e. moving house and changing job or employer. Such an analysis requires information on the commuting behaviour of separate individuals over time. Unfortunately, ‘transport ’ panel surveys are rarely available, particularly for a sufficiently long time period or for a sufficiently large sample to examine such changes more than cursively. For the UK, none exists for other than limited regions. However, the ongoing British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), begun in 1991, does provide some information related to transport – household car ownership, main commuting mode and commuting travel time – as well as information on the economic and socio-demographic characteristics of the households surveyed. In our earlier work, the BHPS has been used to analyse and model car ownership. This paper is a first attempt to exploit the BHPS data to examine commuting mode and travelling time