This paper contributes to the limited number of investigations into the influence of the spatial configuration of land use and transport systems on mode choice for medium-and longer-distance travel (defined here as home-based trips of 50 km and over) in the Netherlands. We have employed data from the 1998 Netherlands National Travel Survey to address the question as to how socioeconomic factors, land use attributes, and travel time affect mode choice for medium-and longer-distance travel, and how their role varies across trip purposes: commuting, business, and leisure. The empirical analysis indicates that land use attributes and travel time considerations are important in explaining the variation in mode choice for medium-and longer-distance travel when controlling for the socioeconomic characteristics of travellers.

Summary. In advanced economies, flows play an important part in connecting urban nodes. This paper sets up a framework for identifying and classifying the pattern of the urban systems from an interaction perspective. Three S-dimensions are proposed (that is, the strength of interaction, the symmetry of interaction and the structure of the network) and a set of indices that are important for characterising network configurations. Using the European long-distance mobility database (DATELINE), the framework is applied to examine the pattern of interaction between functional urban areas (FURs) in France and Germany. The analysis is carried out separately for three journey purposes: business, holiday and leisure. The results reveal that national urban systems embrace a wide variety of constellations and that considerable variation in these constellations can be observed across journey purposes and countries. Overall, the authors are confident that the proposed framework provides a useful analytical tool for characterising the configurations of urban systems.

Social and economic benefits have accrued from medium-and long-distance travel, but at the expense of the environment. Since the travel behaviour literature tends to concentrate on shortdistance trips or trips within daily urban systems, a better understanding of the factors shaping medium-and long-distance travel is needed. Using the 1998 National Travel Surveys for the UK and the Netherlands, the study reported here characterises medium-and long-distance travellers in terms of socio-economic attributes, time availability, day of travel, and land-use related factors. The results suggest that, in both countries, males and individuals with a higher socio-economic status are more likely to engage in medium-and long-distance travel. The analysis further shows that the overall structure of the urban system in combination with the size of the country and the local population density affect the participation in medium-and long-distance travel. Such factors should be considered explicitly in future studies of medium-and long-distance travel.

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Although many studies employ either interaction-or node-attribute data to study the positions of cities in the urban system, relatively little is known about the relationships between these two different types of data. This study explores this relationship by ranking and comparing 39 metropolitan areas in Western Europe according to their relative role in the system of flows and their concentration of functions. The former is measured via the intensity of interaction, and the connectivity or distribution of interaction across links associated with nodes. The latter is measured via four dimensions: its sociodemographic, economic, transport accessibility, and tourism characteristics. The results show that the relationships between interaction and node attributes differ for types of flow. Compared with business flows, holiday flows and node-attributes are less strongly correlated. We also find that the differences between the two rankings can be explained to some extent by the fact that corporeal interaction is influenced by the physical barriers imposed by sea.