Household Structure and Mobility Patterns of Women in O-D Surveys: Methods and Results Based on the Case Studies of Montreal and Paris

The importance of household structure on mobility patterns in urban areas has been revealed by many studies. However, data for this type of analysis are not always available even though the need for taking into account family structure may be extremely important in the explanation of differences in travel behavior, namely in the comparative analysis of different socioeconomic or cultural contexts. Furthermore, the interest of studying the mobility patterns in relationship to household structure may give important insights into structural patterns of mobility behavior useful for forecasting. It would also give useful results for gender analysis. Telephone travel surveys are widely used because they are cheaper and often easier to realize but, due to the short duration of the interview, they usually do not contain direct information on family structure more easily obtained from longer at-home interviews. This paper is an attempt to validate and generalize a methodology presented elsewhere (Séguin and Bussière, forthcoming, 1996) for the Montreal region which reconstructed the variable of household structure from the telephone Origin-Destination (O-D) Travel Survey of 1987 which did not include questions on family ties between individuals living in the same household. We are presenting here the validation of the typology of household structure which was done on the basis of the Enquête Générale de Transport (EGT) 1991-92 survey of Paris and the 1993 O-D survey of Montreal and we present a few comparative results. Being confronted with the lack of the variable of the activity of the population in the survey of Montreal, we defined a working person as a person making at least one worktrip (or for business affairs) the day of the survey. We analyzed the differences in the relative distribution of family forms and the travel behaviors of individuals by sex, type of household, activity (working or not) with the help of a few global parameters (total mobility, mobility by mode).