Analysis of Travel Time Expenditure of School-Going Children

Travel behaviour of school-going children has been a topic of scientific discourse. School trips hold a significant share of peak-hour trips in many Indian cities and are considered a major contributor to congestion. Commute mode choice, time-of-day of trip departure, time use, intra-household interaction with regard to chauffeuring, etc., are some of the topics on children's travel behaviour that have seen significant development over the past decades. However, relatively less research has been undertaken on children's travel time expenditure. This research contributes to the domain of travel time analysis. The present study hypothesizes that school-going children (usually) have a travel time bound associated with their school commute. The revealed travel time can be considered as a function of this bound. Stochastic frontier modelling, alternatively production frontier concept, is considered for investigating the travel time expenditure. This approach allows for investigating the unobserved bound using the revealed travel time and several explanatory variables. The econometric model is estimated using the household travel survey data for Bangalore city for the year 2010. The statistically significant empirical model for the conditional mean indicates that the concept of travel time bound holds for the data set. Parameter estimates suggest that male students have a higher bound compared with females, an observation aligning with conventional wisdom. Furthermore, students travelling on motorized modes are observed to have a higher time bound compared with non-motorized mode users. This might be an indication of the unreliability associated with the travel time on motorized vehicles during congested times when most school trips happen. Planning implications of the research findings are also discussed in the chapter.