Evaluation of Day Pattern Choice of Individuals in the Western Province of Sri Lanka

Abstract

Traditional considerations of traffic safety focus on the physical environment, and road user’s behaviour to ensure sustainable transportation. Road user’s driving behaviour and travel patterns play an important role among these. New forms of transportation demand models use an activity-based approach that requires an activity pattern to be assigned to each road user. This research presents the analysis of travel patterns based on a classification procedure in which the set of measurements that define human behaviour is represented by a coding pattern using the outcomes of the dataset of 35,850 households among a total of 124,673 individual daily diaries collected from the CoMTrans study. A total of 1431 activity patterns were observed in the western province. The most common daily pattern is Staying at Home (H), which is around 35.51% of the total population. The 2nd and 3rd most common tour patterns are "H2S3H" (school tour starts at home, leaving home on AM Peak to school and returning to home on Mid-Day) and "H2W4H" (work tour starts at home, leaving home on AM Peak to work and back to home on PM Peak). Each pattern of activity was related to the socioeconomic characteristics of that person. Tour modes were also identified according to each activity. Tour modes were also identified according to each activity. This analysis will form the basis for the development of an activity-based transport model for Sri Lanka in the future, which will help town planners better understand the city’s travel behaviour and thus formulate well-organized travel demand management policies to move towards sustainable transportation.