Abstract
In the area of low dense and dispersed urban functions, households which own multiple cars have remarkably increased.
Under this circumstance, the mobility of the people who are not available to drive an automobile is going to reduce through the decline of the public trasport service.
In a such area, the unlicensed people have to secure their mobility with the support by their household members. This paper tries to analyze travel behavior of the lisenced and the unlicensed, considering household structure (e. g. life cycle stage). The data for analysis, in which 1, 130 households and 3, 673 people are contained, are obtained by the Ryomo Region Person Trip Survey conducted in 1989 in Gunma Prefecture, Japan.
Since the aim of person trip survey gives slight consideration to the relationships within household members, it is difficult to specify the household relationships. Life cycle stages in households, however, are defined considering the difference in age within household members, and these validity as the explanatory factors for the travel behavior of the unlicensed has been confirmed in this paper.
The results of analyzing travel behavior are as follows:
1) the number and the socioeconomic characteristics of the licensed members in household differ in life cycle stage;
2) the outing rate and the trip rate for the licensed are higher than those for the unlicensed, and have nothing to do with life cycle stages, while those of the unlicensed differ in life cycle stages;
3) the car-ride-together is utilized as one of the main travel mode for the unlicensed;
4) the necessity of the car-ride-together causes multi-car ownership in a household; and
5) the socioeconomic characteristics of the unlicensed users for car-ride-together differ in life cycle stages.
In conclusion, it is clarified that the life cycle stages in households are effective factors for explaining travel behavior.
