Socio Demographic Groupings and Revealed Retail Travel Behavior in Brisbane, Australia

This study examines the socio-demographic attributes of people making retail trips. It applies the two-step cluster analysis to classify the characteristics of retail trip makers in Brisbane, Australia. The 2009 South East Queensland Household Travel Survey (SEQ-HTS) dataset is used to identify the most common socio-demographic groups of retail trip makers. Researchers looking at retail travel have traditionally focussed on the form and structure of retail destinations while ignoring the socio-demographic characteristics of the travellers and their behaviour. Despite the fact that retail trips comprise about 20% of all trips each week in South East Queensland, they have been neglected in travel demand management programs. Classifying all customers into manageable and not predetermined taxonomies allow travel behaviour of different socio-demographic to be studied. Different aspects of people’s travel behaviour such as retail trip rate, mode share frequency and distance per capita by each mode are examined. The trip frequency to shopping destinations is also analysed based on the “type of product”. These results show that working people with children, housekeepers and the retired rely more on their cars for retail trips than other groups. Trips for groceries and food comprise more than 40% of retail trips for most groups and need attention in future studies.