Modeling of Shopping Participation and Duration of Workers in Calicut

Travel for shopping, one of the non-work activities, forms considerable portion of travel demand and significantly influences the traffic congestion in urban areas. An understanding of behaviour of urban dwellers with respect to participation, duration and timing of shopping activity will be of great help in formulating and assessing urban mobility improvement plans. This paper presents the efforts made to understand the shopping activity travel behavior of workers in Calicut city, one of the major urban centres in Kerala. Binary logit model is used for modelling the behavior of workers in taking up shopping activity. Activity duration, another component of activity participation behavior of individuals, greatly influences timing of travel and peak period congestion. Parametric and semi-parametric hazard based models are tried to model the duration of shopping activity. Parametric models based on Weibull distribution and without heterogeneity component are found to perform better. The modelling efforts helped in identifying the various variables that significantly influence the urban workers decision to participate in shopping. Duration of shopping activity is found to depend on household income, household structure, gender, age, travel mode, travel distance, travel cost, timing of activity and activity start time.