Judgments of travel experiences, activity envelopes, trip features and multi-tasking: A panel effects regression model specification

• Elaborated conceptualization of travel time experience.
• First panel effects model of its kind in transportation research.
• One of the few models estimating the contribution of multitasking and activity envelope on the utility of travel episodes.
• Results support the conceptual framework.

Modeling the contribution of multi-tasking to the utility of travel episodes would be an important objective in the development of the next generation of activity-based models. Conducting activities whilst traveling may affect the utility of activity episodes in a daily schedule. If evidence to that effect can be established, an elaboration of current activity-based models seems warranted. In this paper, as a first step towards the development of such comprehensive activity-based models, we formulate a random effects regression model to analyze the effects of multi-tasking on respondents’ judgments of travel experiences of distinct travel episodes. We extend previous research with a focus on the extent and nature of multi-tasking during a single trip. We analyze repeated judgments of the same individuals for multiple travel episodes, collected over a period of three consecutive months. This longitudinal data analysis allows us to better differentiate between personality traits, temporal effects, multi-tasking and the embedding of travel episodes in the larger activity-travel chains. Results indicate that multi-tasking has a positive impact on travelers’ judgments of travel experiences. Significant effects were also found for the kind of activity that was conducted immediately before and after the travel episode. We conclude therefore that it seems beneficial to include multi-tasking in a new generation of activity-based models, and that the suggested conceptualization and model formulation are feasible and valuable building blocks in the development of such more comprehensive activity-based models.