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Patterns of Walking Among Employed, Urban Canadians: Variations by Commuting Mode, Time of Day, and Days of the Week

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Abstract

This paper illustrates the facility of time-use files to enhance the understanding of behavioral components of commuting. It draws on data from Statistics Canada’s most recent national General Social Survey (2010) to substantiate prior research on the extent that use of public transit for commuting to work is accompanied in people’s days by a greater amount of walking. By verifying alternative explanations for this relationship, the paper explores more thoroughly how walking fits into the daily lives of employed persons in large urban areas. Results show that travel by car comprises upwards of 80 per cent of trips regardless of the hour of the day, while public transportation is used mostly to get to and from paid work. Although walking generally accompanies such transit commutes and is shown to fit sequentially into transit’s temporal patterns, walking spreads out more evenly across the day than transit use and helps complete other trip purposes. The weekday walking pattern extends to weekend days to a surprisingly similar extent, confirming that transit is but one of numerous generators of walking trips. Statistically significant relationships link minutes walked to household income, access to a car, and main mode used for commuting. However, the pre-eminence of commuting by car raises questions about the effective priorities and constraints underlying choice of main commuting mode. More detailed characterization of transit access and subjective questions in time-use surveys could facilitate greater insight into the rationales of the subgroup choosing public transit and walking more frequently and for longer duration.

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Notes

  1. Ugo Lachapelle, Public transit related walking in the 2005 Canadian General Social Survey: Findings and observations on data quality, Unpublished paper presented to the 37th IATUR Conference on Time Use, July 30-August 1, 2014, Turku, Finland.

  2. Another question elicits answers to the question “Thinking of a typical week, what kind of transportation do you use the most?” Answers to the two questions are largely similar but not exactly so. In this paper, we have utilized only the question on last week’s commuting mode, to be consistent and because it is a more exact question.

  3. We are grateful to the Data Library at the University of Toronto for creating and maintaining the merged files in their archives, as well as for their provision of invaluable access and analysis capabilities.

  4. We also examined educational level in this context. Duration in the day of walking varied significantly between the categories of education level, but this variation followed no pattern regarding more or less education, making the variable of little utility in the current analysis.

  5. The general status of subjective information in time-use surveys was summarized in a presentation by William Michelson, “Affect in Time-use Surveys”, to the conference on Developments in the Day Reconstruction Method (DRM) and Related Methods: Review and New Directions, January 8–9, 2015, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the Social Science and Humanities Research Council and the Fonds québécois de recherche sur la société et la culture for funding the second author’s research project on time use and travel. The Data Library at the University of Toronto is also acknowledged for creating and maintaining the merged time use files in their archives.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, 725 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, ON, M5S 2J4, Canada

    William Michelson

  2. Département d’études urbaines et touristiques, École des sciences de la gestion, Université du Québec à Montréal, Case postale 8888, Succursale Centre-Ville, Montréal (Québec), Montréal, QC, H3C 3P8, Canada

    Ugo Lachapelle

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Correspondence to William Michelson.

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Michelson, W., Lachapelle, U. Patterns of Walking Among Employed, Urban Canadians: Variations by Commuting Mode, Time of Day, and Days of the Week. Applied Research Quality Life 11, 1321–1340 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-015-9439-2

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