Does Work Relocation Proceed or Precede Home Relocation?

Understanding the dynamics of households’ behavior on home and occupation is of great importance for multiple fields including transport planning, as it shapes the majority of daily trips and congestion patterns. While their causal dependence has been widely investigated, the simultaneous dependence of their relocation durations is not well-examined. Here, households’ residential and workplace relocation durations are simultaneously modeled using Bayesian copula-based multivariate parametric survival analysis. Three copula formulations are compared. Nested and independent model structures are proposed for modeling the occupation duration in more-than-one-earner households. A comprehensive, retrospectively revealed life-course dataset, concentrated on households’ homeownership, occupation, education, vehicle ownership changes, is collected from Chicago, US, and Sydney, Australia. Positive/negative impacts of sociodemographic, home, and occupation attributes mostly agree in both cities, confirming the similarities in the behavior of the metropolitan area residents. The results reveal that, contrary to expectations, the home and workplace relocation durations are not necessarily strongly correlated. This result opens up many valuable research directions in the field