Analysis of the relationship between internet usage and allocation of time for personal travel and out of home activities: Case study of Scotland in 2005/6

Abstract There is much debate among transportation researchers, practitioners, and policymakers regarding how the opening up of the online world is impacting on people’s physical spatio-temporal patterns. This paper presents a novel analysis of the relationship between internet usage and time use, with time spent traveling (during the course of a 24-h day) and aggregate time spent at out-of-home activities analyzed separately. The empirical analysis draws on the Scottish Household Survey, which contains a unique combination of a one-day travel diary paired with a pseudo-diary of online behavior that captures three distinct dimensions of internet activity: the amount of time that respondents spend online per week, the types of tele-activities that they perform, and where they access the internet. The empirical findings include both ceteris paribus statistical association of specific dimensions of internet usage and aggregate (multi-dimensional) relationships. The latter suggest that (in the context of this dataset), internet usage correlates positively, net of confounding effects, with both time spent traveling and time spent at out-of-home activities.