The impact of activity chaining on the duration of daily activities

There is a broad body of theoretical and empirical literature dealing with trip chaining behaviour. This paper adds to the literature while focusing on the impact of activity chaining on the duration of time spent on individual purposes. Two questions in particular are addressed: first, does an additional purpose added to a trip chain affect the duration of the activities included? Second, is there any pattern of included activities that explains differences in duration? Duration data models are employed using German data. We find evidence that the number of purposes influences duration significantly. Leisure, shopping and personal business activities are affected by the occurrence of obligatory activities (work, school/university). We cannot find any evidence that personal business or leisure activities influence the duration of shopping, whereas the opposite is supported. Therefore, in terms of daily activities, obligatory and shopping activities are superior to leisure and personal business. We conclude that activity chaining and especially the pattern of combined purposes affect the duration of activities allocated to single purposes while controlling for a wide range of other explanatory variables. The results can be used in transport and simulation models. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013