Travel-time ratios for visits to the workplace: the relationship between commuting time and work duration

For a better understanding of commuting behavior, the home-to-work journey has to be addressed in the context of daily time use. Although many studies have analyzed commuting times, the influence of the time spent working on the home-to-work travel time has only been investigated indirectly. This paper uses the travel-time ratio concept to investigate the association between work duration and commuting. We describe the theoretical framework of the travel-time ratio and analyze realized travel-time ratios for work activities with data from the 1998 Dutch National Travel Survey. It is shown that workers, on average, spend 10.5% of the time available for work and travel on commuting, which corresponds to 28 min (single trip) for an 8-h workday. The travel-time ratio varies systematically with sociodemographic variables; urban form is of rather limited importance in the explanation of travel-time ratio values. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.