Workshop Resource Paper – Full Version Emerging Issues in Travel Behavior Analysis

This paper is a resource paper on emerging issues in travel behavior analysis that have implications for the future of the National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) in the United States. The paper provides an overview of recent trends in activity and travel behavior research, both from a behavioral perspective and a methodological perspective. Based on these recent and emerging trends, the paper presents a series of suggestions regarding how the future NHTS can be enhanced, augmented, and modernized to serve the future needs of planners and researchers in the field. In particular, the paper suggests that the NHTS move towards an activity-based time use survey format incorporating questions about attitudes, perceptions, values, information acquisition and use, and decision making processes. In addition, it is suggested that a component of the NHTS be converted into a multi-day rotating panel to provide data on both short- and longer-term behavioral dynamics. These suggestions need to be weighed carefully against the increased respondent burden and survey costs that might be involved with their implementation