Constructing human activity spaces: A new approach incorporating complex urban activity-travel

Activity space represents an important concept for understanding human activity-travel. The existing activity space delineation approaches are limited in fully characterizing real-world travel behaviors. To address the issue, this research proposes a new time geography based approach to more accurately portray activity spaces of urban travelers. The proposed approach takes into account the full complexity of real-world travel and underlying urban structures. Results of an empirical study are presented based on the 2008 Add-on National Household Travel Survey conducted in Tucson, Arizona. Activity spaces of 1164 sample travelers are delineated and analyzed. Results show the effectiveness of the new approach in more realistically depicting urban activity-travel.