THE SCHEDULING OF CONSUMER ACTIVITIES: WORK TRIPS

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the scheduling of activities by consumers can be explicitly modeled in theoretically satisfactory and empirically productive way. Even in the case of urban work trips, probably one of the most tightly constrained of everyday activities, schedule shifting is found to be of quantitative importance for the understanding of urban transportation systems. Considerable effort will be required to assess fully the implications of this type of behavior for such important areas of transportation analysis as demand studies, value-of-time measurement, policy simulation, and cost-benefit analysis. Meanwhile, it seems likely that this approach can be applied productively to other goods subject to peak demands.