Time allocation to discretionary in-home, out-of-home activities and to trips

The present work analyzes the allocation of time to discretionary in-home and out-of-home activities separately from the trips they generate, so as to capture the effects that the exogenous variables characterizing the transport system and the individual's and household socioeconomic characteristics have on time allocation to discretionary trips. A Nested-Tobit model has been used, which is a discrete-continuous model with limited dependent variable. The model's structure embodies a hierarchical sequence of two equations that describe how the individuals choose to allocate their discretionary time between in-and out-of-home activities ( activity programme) and between trips and activities ( activity scheduling). The empirical results assign greater descriptive power to mandatory non-work activities for the trade-off between in-home and out-of-home activities, but the number of trips and the time allocated to mandatory trips were the two activity variables that most influenced the time to be allocated to discretionary trips.