Publication Detail

Nonwork Travel Behavior Changes during Temporary Freeway Closure: The Fix I-5 Project in Sacramento, California

UCD-ITS-RP-11-49

Journal Article

Sustainable Transportation Center

Available online at doi: 10.3141/2231-01

Suggested Citation:
Yun, Meiping, David van Herick, Patricia L. Mokhtarian (2011) Nonwork Travel Behavior Changes during Temporary Freeway Closure: The Fix I-5 Project in Sacramento, California. Transportation Research Record 2231, 1 - 9

A 1-mi stretch of Interstate 5 in downtown Sacramento, California, was intermittently closed for reconstruction in the summer of 2008. Nonwork travel behavior changes during the reconstruction were investigated with the use of data from two contemporaneous Internet surveys. More than half of the sample of 6,362 respondents made at least one studied change during the study period, including changes of route, activity location, time of day, day of an activity, and cancellation of an activity. First, the choice to make any nonwork travel change was modeled with binary probit (the any change model). Respondents were more likely to make nonwork travel changes when traffic conditions were worse than usual and less likely to do so when conditions were much better than usual. Women were more likely to make changes than men were. Those travelers who were not aware of any of the travel demand management measures designed to mitigate the impacts of the reconstruction were less likely to make nonwork changes. Next, the five individual nonwork changes were simultaneously modeled with multivariate probit. Again, women were more likely to make the individual changes studied (except route changes). The impacts of traffic conditions and commute characteristics were consistent with those in the any change model. Unobserved characteristics associated with the two temporal changes (day and time) were highly correlated, as were those associated with the two spatial changes (location and route). Unobserved influences on location, day, and time changes were highly correlated with those affecting activity cancellation.