Leisure travel distance of elderly population : the case of the Netherlands

The population of the Netherlands is getting older. These changes in population cause new challenges in understanding the needs of elderly such as mobility. Mobility is a significant aspect of the elderly’s quality of life since it provides them the means to reach the services, fulfilling their needs. Moreover, elderly have more leisure time as they do not work. Conducting leisure activities also increases the elderly’s quality of life and this in turn causes more travel. This paper examines travel distance for leisure activities while focusing on different age groups. Analysis are carried out by applying seemingly unrelated regression analysis on a national continuous leisure time data set collected in 2008 in the Netherlands. The results indicate that there are significant effects of age, gender, social class, household composition, urban density, day of week, time of the day, activity type, transport mode, travel party, duration and expenditure on travel distance of the elderly sample