Exploring causalities between modal habits, activity scheduling, and multi-day locational practices.

Despite raising awareness of sustainable behavior and considerable investments in the public transport network and active mobility infrastructure, car use remains the main practice for daily mobility in Switzerland. This work postulates that resistances to change at the individual level annihilate top-down modal shift measures. These resistances are assumed to be rooted in various forms of familiar practices, routines and habits and thereby require multi-day analysis of mobility patterns, going beyond what most mobility census data allows. This research proposes a set of metrics (complexity, home shift, regularity and proximity) to better characterize five modal habit profiles and day-to-day regularities in activity-travel behaviors. On the one hand, locational variability addresses the spatial familiarity of individuals’ activity space. Measures of recurrent and frequent activity spaces are obtained by mean of centrography and longitudinal spatial analysis. On the other hand, temporal variability addresses the structure of schedules and time-allocation. Results are based on a fine-grained longitudinal travel-diary collected in Switzerland in 2019. The main objective of this paper is to highlight the relations between modal habits and multi-day activity-travel arrangements to better address resistances to change