摘要：AbstractTiming of trips and tours play a very important role in travel demand modeling. To deal with issues related to congestion, the planner must have a clear understanding of the timing of travel patterns. In the literature, there is very little attention t o tour- based modeling in the developing country context. The inability of the current practice in evaluating substitution of trips and tours across intra-day periods in responses to time-varying policies (flexible and staggered work hours) and system attributes (congestion or tolls) needs to be addressed. To address these shortcomings, this study uses tours as the fundamental unit of analysis to circumvent discontinuity in mode choice and independence assumption in trip-based models. For this study, tour data from nearly 1000 workers are extracted from the Chennai Household Activity and Travel Survey 2004-05. Based on the information about the peak traffic, the 24 hour time-window was split into 6 time intervals. The nominal nature of the dependent variable is captured using Multinomial Logit Model (MNL). This paper investigates the timing decisions of tours in the context of Indian city, Chennai. Three related sub-objectives are pursued towards this goal: 1. develop models of tour timing (departure times) for workers, 2. analyze the role of individual, household, work-related, modal characteristics and transportation system attributes on this timing decision, and 3. understand the differences in behavior of tour timing between work tours and non-mandatory tours of workers.
