Structures of Leisure Travel: Temporal and Spatial Variability

Abstract

Leisure activities play an increasingly dominant role in our daily lives. Their importance has increased steadily over the last 40 years compared with other activities. Considering leisure travel, one would expect to discover this trend in recent empirical work. Unfortunately, this has not been possible in Germany or other countries due to a lack of suitable data. The lack of such data is mainly caused by different leisure activities being performed sporadically, which are influenced by changing conditions such as the weather, traffic, etc. It is thus desirable to obtain data over periods substantially longer than 1 or even several days (longitudinal data). The longitudinal 6‐week Mobidrive survey data match this requirement and are analysed here with regards to leisure activities. The Mobidrive data allow the examination of aspects of temporal and spatial variability and separate analyses of distinct detailed leisure activities. Because leisure traffic has been rarely analysed from a longitudinal perspective, it is difficult to generalize the results. For this reason, a similar but outdated dataset (Uppsala dataset) is used to validate the results.