MOBILITY AND MODE CHOICE OF PEOPLE OF COLOR FOR NON-WORK TRAVEL

This paper takes a comprehensive look at mobility and mode choice behavior of people of color for their non-work travel. Travel by people of color is of strong policy interest because it is a growing and changing share of the total travel market and is expected to continue to grow much faster than overall travel well into the next century. The Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey (NPTS) provides a valuable data source for exploring travel behavior. Understanding non-work travel is becoming increasingly important due to its growing influence in people's lives and on the transportation system. Non-work travel includes travel for personal and family business, school activities, and religious activities, health care, and social and recreational activities. Work trip travel has declined to about 20% of all local travel. Even during traditional commuting rush periods, non-work travel comprises more than 70% of all trips. The resultant changes in temporal and spatial distributions of travel in metropolitan areas influence the types of transportation investments, services, and policies that can be used to address travel needs. This paper compares mobility trends by group using information from the 1983, 1990, and 1995 NPTS databases. Mode choice differences across groups are analyzed by examining how patterns of difference in mode choice vary with personal, household, geographic, and trip characteristics as reported in the 1995 NPTS. The exhaustive analysis examined a variety of distributions and tabulations and uses logistic regression to further explore mode choice differences between racial/ethnic groups. The analysis indicates that the differences in non-work travel behavior for the various racial/ethnic groups has changed dramatically over time with minority travel behavior more closely matching majority behaviors. Mobility for minority travelers has increased and mode choice behavior, while still different, more closely resembles that of the aggregate population. Variations in aggregate group behavior can almost always be explained by socioeconomic and geographic conditions. The most significant race- or ethnicity-based difference appears to be a greater use of public transit by the African-American population, even when the socioeconomic characteristics of travelers are taken into account.