Travel time use over five decades

In this paper, we use five decades of time-use surveys in the U.S. to document trends in travel time uses. We find that total travel time features an inverted-U shape, registering a 20 percent increase from 1975 to 1993, but an 18 percent decline from 1993 to 2013. We find that demographic shifts explain roughly 45 percent of the increase from 1975 to 1993, but play a much smaller role afterwards. From 2003 to 2013 the shift of time allocation from travel-intensive non-market work to travel-non-intensive leisure accounts for around 50 percent of the decline in total travel time.