Active Travel Behavior

Paper is submitted for Presentation at the 88 th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board only. This paper has been submitted for publication in Transportation Letters (July 2008) and therefore does not conform to the word count and citation requirements specified for publication in the Transportation Research Record. ABSTRACT Physical inactivity has become a dominant feature of most American's lives over the past quarter century. This has spurred an entire research domain straddling several different disciplines. Although model development within the field of travel behavior as a whole continues today with more momentum than ever, the focus on active mode choice has largely been overlooked and left to a small fragment of transportation and public health researchers. Research regarding active mode choice has been primarily conducted outside the field of travel behavior and has utilized research methods designed for other purposes. This leads to results which address behavioral causality in a superficial way while also neglecting the role of residential self-selection. This paper provides an overview of existing travel behavior analysis regarding active mode choice, presents potential threats to validity in this type of research, and critiques existing intervention methodologies. Additionally, a conceptual model of active travel behavior is presented and the roots of each component are discussed. By applying the rigor of travel behavior research to the subfield of active travel behavior research, and incorporating the conceptual model provided, great strides can be made relatively quickly in understanding animate mode choice and active travel behavior. 2 INTRODUCTION As overweight and obesity have become a bigger issue in Americans' daily lives, they have been attributed multiple times to the lack of physical activity in today's society. This has spurred a renewed interest in the aforementioned arena, and many researchers now claim that current lifestyle patterns such as the prolific reliance on personal vehicle use as well as a separation of land uses, have " engineered physical activity for non-exercise purposes out of many Americans lives " (Sallis, Frank, Saelens, and Kraft, 2004). Recent studies of the connection between physical activity and the built environment have produced masses of data focusing on every possible connection from time allocation and personal characteristics, to the natural and built environment, as well as lifestyles and attitudes. Many key environmental variables have been identified as promoters or deterrents to active travel, which have given researchers as well as planners and policy makers guidance when …