This dissertation seeks to understand travel satisfaction, travel affinity, and other psychological factors in relation to travel demand, such as the desire for trip making, willingness to spend time traveling, and choice of travel mode. The research was based on the Mood State in Transport Environments survey of 247 Android users (about 6,000 completed trip surveys) in the Blacksburg-Roanoke, VA, Washington, DC, and Minneapolis, MN metropolitan areas from fall 2016 to spring 2018. Respondents answered an entry survey, tracked their travel for 7 days, and answered a trip survey associated with each trip. The dataset provides opportunities to examine travel and activities during travel at the within- and between-person levels. Three studies in this dissertation examined three measures of the positive utility of travel and their relationship with travel behavior. I quantified (1) the desirability of trip making, (2) the ideal travel time related to different travel characteristics, and (3) the effect of satisfaction on commute mode choice. The first study examines the patterns of travel affinity with various travel modes, trip purposes, and activities during the trip. Travel affinity was measured by asking the willingness to forgo a trip when there is an opportunity to do so. I found that this is a valid and strong measure of the positive utility of travel. Travelers were more willing to make trips when they traveled on foot or bicycle, talked with someone during the trip, and took shorter trips. Additionally, commute trips were less likely to be enjoyed as compared to other, non-commute trips. The second study focused on (1) testing the validity of the "ideal travel time" measurement and (2) measuring factors associated with the willingness to spend time traveling. I found that although ideal travel time was a strong measure of the positive utility of travel, it was very weakly associated with the desirability of trip making and satisfaction with trips. Although few people wanted zero commute time (3%), the number of trips that had zero ideal travel time was much higher (16%), indicating that the desired travel amount may vary across different trip and environmental characteristics and purpose. Ideal travel time was longer for active travel trips, leisure trips, when conducting activities during trips (e.g., talking, using the phone, looking at the landscape), when traveling with companions and during the weekend. The third study investigated the role of travel satisfaction and attitude in mode choice behavior. This is one of the very few studies that have considered the role of these psychological factors in multimodal mode choice based on revealed preference data. I found that satisfaction and attitude toward modes and travel played a significant role in the choice model; it also modified the role of travel time in the models. However, the perception of travel time usefulness was insignificant in the model. Scenario analyses based on the model results showed that it is optimal to invest in active transportation and public transit at the same time in order to shift car drivers to these sustainable modes. These studies contribute to the small but growing body of literature on the positive utility of travel and transrational decision making in transportation. It is the only study that employed a smartphone survey with a repeated measure of trips over the course of 1-2 weeks. The third study is among the earliest attempts to include satisfaction and attitude together into mode choice models. This dissertation has several implications for research and practice. First, it calls for better measurements of well-being and satisfaction. Second, models with appropriate psychological factors would more realistically resemble actual travel behavior. Including satisfaction in the choice model changes the coefficient of travel time (and potentially cost), which modifies the value of travel time savings, a basis of most benefit-cost analyses in transportation planning and engineering. Better mode choice and trip generation models will generate more reliable predictions of future infrastructure use and investment. Third, studies of travel affinity (positive utility of travel) have implications for demand modeling and management practice. Practitioners should reevaluate the effectiveness of travel demand management strategies aimed at reducing travel time and trips, such as congestion pricing (e.g., tolls), online shopping, and telecommuting. / Doctor of Philosophy / People have various motivations to travel every day. For some, traveling is a means to an end to get from one place to another. Their main travel purpose is to perform some activities at destinations, such as grocery shopping, working, or visiting a friend. For others, traveling is a joy to get some fresh air, to be on one’s own company, to enjoy driving or exercising (while walking or bicycling), in addition to conducting activities at destinations. This idea of traveling for fun is still unpopular in transportation research. This dissertation seeks to understand the patterns of travel and motivations: who are traveling for fun, and when? Whether this affinity and satisfaction for travel drive people’s decision to choose a travel mode? To answer these questions, I measured the affinity for travel in two ways: willingness to make trips (i.e., travel from one place to another) and desired amount of time spent on travel. I found that people were willing to travel more when they conducted certain activities during trips, such as talking to others, talking on the phone, or other activities. Commuting was less fun as compared to other travel purposes, such as socializing or leisure. Bicyclists and pedestrians liked their trips and wanted to travel more than car drivers and bus users. People who were satisfied with their commute trips made by one mode would be more likely to use that mode for commuting. The affinity for travel is relevant to urban residents’ mental well-being and demand for travel, which translate into health and congestion relief benefits. The results from my studies suggest that more attentions on traveling for fun and multitasking should be paid to account for future mobility options, such as ride hailing (e.g., Uber, Lyft) and autonomous vehicles. These modes have promised fun from activities during travel, the autonomy, and convenience, and thus would generate more traffic on the road while providing less social and environmental benefits. The results from this dissertation would inform city planners, engineers, and health practitioners on planning for sustainable cities by improving well-being for transportation users and accommodate sustainable modes of transport, such as bicycling, walking, and transit by providing users with safe and satisfactory travel environments. The results also imply potential pitfalls of the current planning practice such as overestimating the value of travel time savings, benefit-cost analyses, and the effectiveness of travel demand management strategies, such as telecommuting and using information and communications, in reducing travel.

Syfte: Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka hur det kommer sig att den fysiska resebyrån finns kvar och hur framtiden ser ut hos dessa i och med teknologins snabba framväxt.  Metod: Denna studie utgår ifrån en kvalitativ metod. För att samla in data till empirin har tio semistrukturerade intervjuer genomförts med olika resebyråer belägna i Stockholm, via personliga möten, telefon och e-post. De resebyråer som undersökts är Jade Travel, Lotus Travel, Resevaruhuset, Resecity, Apollo, Ving, Nygren & Lind, Jorden Resor, BIG Travel och Globetrotter. Teoretisk referensram: De teorier som använts i studien behandlar konsumentbeteende, distributionskanaler, servicescape, dynamiken av servicemötet och relationen mellan konsument och resebyrå. Slutsats: Den fysiska resebyrån har i och med teknologins framväxt förändrats på så sätt att dagens fysiska resebyråer värderar det fysiska servicemötet med kunden. En del fysiska resebyråer har minskat i antal men servicekvaliteten tillsammans med kompetens och kunskap hos de anställda i resebyråerna har blivit högre, detta föra att kunna konkurrera mot andra resebyråer och deras virtuella tjänster samt för att skapa en relation med konsumenterna. / Purpose: The purpose of this essay is to examine why physical travel agencies still exist, and what the future looks like for those agencies since the technology's rapid growth.  Method: This study is based on a qualitative methodology. Ten semi-structured interviews have been conducted for the empirical data. The interviews were held with various travel agencies located in Stockholm through personal meetings, telephone and e-mail. The travel agencies who participated in the interviews was; Jade Travel, Lotus Travel, Resevaruhuset, Resecity, Apollo, Ving, Nygren & Lind, Jorden Resor, BIG Travel and Globetrotter. Theoretical framework: The theories that have been used in this essay are consumer decision making, distribution channels, servicescape, the dynamics of the service encounter and the relationship between customer and travel agency. Conclusion: The physical travel agency has since the technology's development changed on a way that today's physical travel agencies evaluate the physical service meeting with the customer. Some physical agencies have decreased in number but the quality of service along with the skills and knowledge among employees of the travel agencies has increased, therefore to compete against other travel agencies and their virtual services, and to create a relationship with the consumers.

This thesis presents an investigation of arterial travel time and reliability. Specifically an examination of the proposed arterial travel time reliability performance measures detailed in Federal Highway Administration’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on national performance management measures are performed. These measures, including level of travel time reliability and peak hour travel time ratio, are computed and compared to those currently used to quantify congestion and travel time reliability. Within this process several commonly used data sources are evaluated to determine the effects of data quality and data source on performance measure evaluation. The newly created Urban Streets Reliability tool is also evaluated for its ability to estimate the effect of several proposed projects on the travel time reliability of a transportation network. In conclusion, this thesis found that the proposed travel time reliability performance measures show definite differences in estimates of facility reliability as compared with currently used performance measures such as travel time index and planning time index. A variation in the magnitude of this difference was also observed based on a rural vs. urban roadway setting. Finally, further areas of research involving the use of the Urban Streets Reliability tool to estimate the impact of reliability improvements on side streets and the transportation network as a whole are discussed.

The thesis examines Youth Travel, the new trend and new segment of tourism. Its goal is to analyze this market and recommend the appropriate strategy to the destinations and enterprises in order to attract Youth Travelers. The theoretical part presents the definition of Youth Travel, indicates its benefits and analyses the factors of its development. The analytical part is concerned with the potential of the Czech Republic for the development of Youth Travel and the tendency of Youth Travelers to visit this destination. The contribution of this work can be seen in the new product concept which might be helpful in attracting Youth Travelers to one of the regions of the Czech Republic.

Recent developments in microsimulation modeling of activity and travel demand have called for the explicit recognition of time-space constraints under which individuals perform their activity and travel patterns. The estimation of time-space prism vertex locations, i.e., the perceived time constraints, is an important development in this context. Stochastic frontier modeling methodology offers a suitable framework for modeling and identifying the expected vertex locations of time space prisms within which people execute activity-travel patterns. In this work, stochastic frontier models of time space prism vertex locations are estimated for samples drawn from a household travel survey conducted in 2001 in the city of Thane on the west coast of India and National Household Travel Survey 2001, United States. This offers an opportunity to study time constraints governing activity travel patterns of individuals in a developing as well as developed country context. The work also includes comparisons between males and females, workers and non-workers, and developed and developing country contexts to better understand how socio-economic and socio-cultural norms and characteristics affect time space prism constraints. It is found that time space prism constraints in developing country data set can be modeled using the stochastic frontier modeling methodology. It is also found that significant differences exist between workers and non-workers and between males and females,possibly due to the more traditional gender and working status roles in the Indian context. Finally, both differences and similarities were noticed when comparisons were made between results obtained from the data set of India and United States. Many of these differences can be explained by the presence of other constraints including institutional, household, income, and transportation accessibility constraints that are generally significantly greater in the developing country context.

This research examined if travelers are paying for travel on managed lanes (MLs) as they indicated that they would in a 2008 survey. The other objectives of this research included estimating travelers’ value of travel time savings (VTTS) and their value of travel time reliability (VOR), and examining the multiple survey designs used in a 2008 survey to identify which survey design better predicted ML traveler behavior. To achieve the objectives, an Internet-based follow-up stated preference (SP) survey of Houston’s Katy Freeway travelers was conducted in 2010. Three survey design methodologies—Db-efficient, random level generation, and adaptive random—were tested in this survey. A total of 3,325 responses were gathered from the survey, and of those, 869 responses were from those who likely also responded to the previous 2008 survey. Mixed logit models were developed for those 869 previous survey respondents to estimate and compare the VTTS to the 2008 survey estimates. It was found that the 2008 survey estimates of the VTTS were very close to the 2010 survey estimates. In addition, separate mixed logit models were developed from the responses obtained from the three different design strategies in the 2010 survey. The implied mean VTTS varied across the design-specific models. Only the Db-efficient design was able to estimate a VOR. Based on this and several other metrics, the Db-efficient design outperformed the other designs. A mixed logit model including all the responses from all three designs was also developed; the implied mean VTTS was estimated as 65 percent ($22/hr) of the mean hourly wage rate, and the implied mean VOR was estimated as 108 percent ($37/hr) of the mean hourly wage rate. Data on actual usage of the MLs were also collected. Based on actual usage, the average VTTS was calculated as $51/hr. However, the $51/hr travelers are paying likely also includes the value travelers place on travel time reliability of the MLs. The total (VTTS+VOR) amount estimated from the all-inclusive model from the survey was $59/hr, which is close to the value estimated from the actual usage. The Db-efficient design estimated this total as $50/hr. This research also shows that travelers have a difficulty in estimating the time they save while using a ML. They greatly overestimate the amount of time saved. It may well be that even though travelers are saving a small amount of time they value that time savings (and avoiding congestion) much higher – possibly similar to their amount of perceived travel time savings. The initial findings from this study, reported here, are consistent with the hypothesis that travelers are paying for their travel on MLs, much as they said that they would in our previous survey. This supports the use of data on intended behavior in policy analysis.

In recent years, various researches are under progress to enhance the quality of the travel survey. These researches were mainly performed with the aid of GPS technology. Initially the researches were mainly focused on the vehicle travel mode due to the availability of GPS technology in vehicle. But, nowadays due to the accessible of GPS devices for personal uses, researchers have diverted their focus on personal mobility in all travel modes. This master’s thesis aimed at developing a mechanism to extract one type of travel survey information particularly travel mode from collected GPS dataset. The available GPS dataset is collected for travel modes of walk, bike, car, and public transport travel modes such as bus, train and subway. The developed procedure consists of two stages where the first is the dividing the track trips into trips and further the trips into segments by means of a segmentation process. The segmentation process is based on an assumption that a traveler switches from one transportation mode to the other. Thus, the trips are divided into walking and non walking segments. The second phase comprises a procedure to develop a classification model to infer the separated segments with travel modes of walk, bike, bus, car, train and subway. In order to develop the classification model, a supervised classification method has been used where decision tree algorithm is adopted. The highest obtained prediction accuracy of the classification system is walk travel mode with 75.86%. In addition, the travel modes of bike and bus have shown the lowest prediction accuracy. Moreover, the developed system has showed remarkable results that could be used as baseline for further similar researches.

The overall goal of the dissertation is to contribute to the growing literature on the activity-based framework by focusing on the modeling of choices that are influenced by land-use and travel environment attributes. An accurate characterization of activity-travel patterns requires explicit consideration of the land-use and travel environment (referred to as travel environment from here on). There are two important categories of travel environment influences: direct (or causal) and indirect (or self-selection) effects. The direct effect of travel environment refers to how travel environment attributes causally influence travel choices. This direct effect may be captured by including travel environment variables as exogenous variables in travel models. Of course, determining if a travel environment variable has a direct effect on an activity/travel choice of interest is anything but straightforward. This is because of a potential indirect effect of the influence of the travel environment, which is not related to a causal effect. That is, the very travel environment attributes experienced by a decision maker (individual or household) is a function of a suite of a priori travel related choices made by the decision maker. The specific emphasis of the current dissertation is on moving away from considering travel environment choices as purely exogenous determinants of activity-travel models, and instead explicitly modeling travel environment decisions jointly along with activity-travel decisions in an integrated framework. Towards this end, the current dissertation formulates econometric models to analyze multidimensional choices. The multidimensional choice situations examined (and the corresponding model developed) in the research effort include: (1) reason for residential relocation and associated duration of stay (joint multinomial logit model and a grouped logit model), (2) household residential location and daily vehicle miles travelled (Copula based joint binary logit and log-linear regression model), (3) household residential location, vehicle type and usage choices (copula based Generalized Extreme Value and log-linear regression model) and (4) activity type, travel mode, time period of day, activity duration and activity location (joint multiple discrete continuous extreme value (MDCEV) model and multinomial logit model (MNL) with sampling of alternatives). The models developed in the current dissertation are estimated using actual field data from Zurich and San Francisco. A variety of policy exercises are conducted to illustrate the advantages of the econometric models developed. The results from these exercises clearly underline the importance of incorporating the direct and indirect effects of travel environment on these choice scenarios. / text

Magistro darbo objektas – kelionės samprata XIX amžiuje, tikslas – išanalizuoti mažiau žinomų ir nagrinėtų keliautojų po Lietuvą tekstus, atskleisti ir suvokti kelionės motyvą XIX amžiaus poezijoje ir prozoje. Tikslo įgyvendinimui darbas suskirstytas į tris dalis ir pasirinkti šie autoriai bei jų kūriniai: V. Sirokomlė „Nemunas nuo versmių iki žiočių“, K. Tiškevičius „Neris ir jos krantai“, A.H. Kirkoras „Pasivaikščiojimai po Vilnių ir jo apylinkes“, M. Balinskis „Vilniaus miesto istorija“, L. A. Jucevičius „Žemaičių žemės prisiminimai“ – tai realios kelionės po Lietuvą; poetinė XIX amžiaus kelionė A.Baranauskas, A. Mickevičius, Maironis, A. Vienažindys, P. Vaičaitis, jų kūryboje stengtasi atskleisti – kaip poetai perteikė kelionės motyvą, kokias prasmes įgyja realiosios kelionės virsdamos dvasinėmis; J. S. Dovydaitis „Šiaulėniškis senelis“, P. Gomalevskis „Aplankymas seniuko“, M. Akelaitis „Kwestorius po Lietuwa wažinedamas žmonis bemokinąsis“, M. Valančius „Palangos Juzė“ – didaktų kelionės, kur aiškinamasi moralinės vertybės, bei kaupiama įvairi medžiaga. Darbo metodai pasirinkti atsižvelgiant į išsikeltus uždavinius: apžvelgti Lietuvą XIX amžiaus keliautojų akimis; išnagrinėti skirtingų autorių kelionių sampratas; ieškoti tekstuose tarpdisciplininių – etnografinių, folklorinių ryšių. Tad daugiausia naudojamas aprašomasis metodas bei remiamasi mitokritikos ir istorizmo metodais. Išanalizavus pirmosios dalies autorius, galima teigti, kad kiekvienas savo kelionėje... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / The object of the master’s work dealing with the travel conception in the XIX century is aimed to the analysis of the lesser-known and studied texts concerning travelers’ and their travels around Lithuania, developing and perceiving travel’s motive in the poetry and prose of the XIX century. With the view of the fulfillment of the aim the work is divided into three units and the writings of the following authors are opted: “The Nemunas from the Springhead to the Outfall” by V. Sirokomlė, “The Neris and its Banks” by K. Tiškevičius, “Strolling around Vilnius and its Surroundings” by A.H. Kirkoras, “The History of Vilnius Town” by M. Balinskis, “The Memories of the Land of the Lowlanders” by L. A. Jucevičius involving real travels around Lithuania; while A.Baranauskas, A. Mickevičius, Maironis, A. Vienažindys, P. Vaičaitis introduce poetical travel of the XIX century aiming to display the methods conveying the travel motifs and expressing significance of the real travels which convert into the spiritual ones; “Grandfather from Siauliai” by J. S. Dovydaitis, “Visiting the Old Codger” by P. Gomalevskis, “Quest Teaching People Traveling around Lithuania” by M. Akelaitis, “ Palangos Juze” by M. Valančius comprehending peregrination by didacts, interpreting moral values and collecting multifarious material. The work methods are chosen according to the set problems: reviewing Lithuania from the point of view of the travelers of the XIX century; approaching travel conceptions... [to full text]

published_or_final_version / abstract / Transport Policy and Planning / Master / Master of Arts in Transport Policy and Planning