Research On The Children’s Travel Constraining Influences Over Family Members’ Travel Behavior

The research on travel behavior is an essential way for making traffic policy andmanaging transportation demand, which is an indispensable basic work for the urban trafficplanning, construction and management. It is also an important project of the urban sociologystudy.Based on the children’s travel characteristics, the children’s travel characteristics wasanalyzed, and its influences on family members were discussed by studying family members’travel mode choice, trip-chaining choice and departure time choice. Based on the fundamentalanalysis, travel mode choice constraint model, trip-chaining choice constraint model anddeparture time choice constraint model were built by concerning influences caused bychildren’s travel demand. Then, the sensitivity analysis was done for the influential factors,discussing the applicability of the children’s travel demand management policy andexcavating other effective policy.The main research contents and results of this paper are:(1) On the basis of referential review of domestic and foreign bibliography, researchmethods in the range of children’s travel were summarized and analyzed, and shortcomings ofexisting research were present. The stochastic utility theory and survival analysis theory wereapplied for studying the influences caused by children’s travel, in order to provide theorybasis for making effective children’s travel demand management policy.(2) The detailed travel behavior characteristics analysis of the children was conductedusing relevant statistical method, including children travel characteristics analysis, its travelcharacteristics changing over the age, the travel characteristics differences of domestic andforeign children and so on. A systemic study was carried on for interpreting children travelcharacteristics, which served as the theoretical support for modeling travel choice constraintmodel.(3) By applying the Multinomial Logit Model and Cox Proportional Hazard Function,three travel choice constraint models were built: travel mode choice constraint model,trip-chaining choice constraint model and departure time choice constraint model. Personalcharacteristics, children characteristics, household characteristics, school characteristics,travel characteristics and mode characteristics were taken into consideration for the models.The model’s statistical characteristics and its precision were verified from the likelihood ratiotest and hit ratio test. The results indicated that models built in this paper could get expectedsolution with high accuracy. (4) Based on referencing the meaning of transportation demand management, themeaning of children travel demand management was defined, and then the children traveldemand management policy applied at home and abroad was introduced, especially theSchool Bus policy and School District Housing&Planning policy. The effectiveness of thepolicy was verified by applying the travel choice constraint models, and then supplied withtheoretical basis for making children travel policy.