Comparing Women's and Men's Morning Commute Trip Chaining in Atlanta, Georgia, by Using Instrumented Vehicle Activity Data

Differences between women's and men's morning commute trip-chaining patterns are examined by using a subset of instrumented vehicle activity observations for 10 days of morning commute journeys made by 182 drivers from 138 households in Atlanta, Georgia. Morning commute trips that involve trip chaining are longer both in distance and in duration for both men and women compared with morning commutes without trip chaining. On the basis of analysis of the Atlanta data reported, overall gender differences in the morning commute trip-chaining patterns for men and women appear to exist. Men traveled a greater distance and spent more time in the morning commute than did women. Men stopped more frequently than women, and women tended to have shorter stop durations than did men. Some of the findings contradict previous research. It is not clear whether the differences reported here are specific to Atlanta, to the households involved in the sample, or perhaps to the specific time frame in which the analyses were undertaken. A larger sampling of the instrumented vehicle data (1 year of commute travel for 250+ households in the Commute Atlanta project) is currently being prepared to further assess these differences and to examine whether gender roles may be changing, at least in Atlanta.