Establishing the Links between Online Activity and Car Use

Abstract

The links between online activity and physical mobility are of wide and growing interest to researchers, practitioners, and policy makers. This paper presents the results of an analysis of microdata from the Scottish household survey. The survey provides a unique, large-scale, nationally representative data set that includes both a travel diary instrument and a pseudodiary of participation in online activity. Multivariate regression models were estimated to relate people's online-activity pro-files with their car driving mileage. The models included demographic and spatial characteristics to control for potential confounding effects. The analysis found that, net of other effects, compared with nonuse of the Internet, Internet usage was associated with a higher level of car use. The marginal effect of time spent online was, however, found to be negatively linked with car use. In other words, spending large amounts of time online is, all else equal, associated with less car driving mileage. The paper concludes with a discussion of further research needs to advance this line of inquiry.

Will Millennials Drive Less as the Economy Recovers: A Postrecession Analysis of Automobile Travel Patterns

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From Transportation Equity to Accessibility Capability: A New Framework to Guide Transportation Planning for Older People

“…Though accessibility measurements incorporating ICTs have been uncommon until recently (Siddiq and Taylor 2021), the trip generation effects of ICTs have been widely explored. Current findings lean towards the suggestion that ICTs and online activities increase daily travel for all purposes (Wang and Law 2007;Le Vine, Latinopoulos and Polak 2014;Kroesen and Handy 2015); for commuting (Mokhtarian 1991;Zhu 2012); for shopping (Farag et al 2007;Cao 2012;Ding and Lu 2017); and for social trips (Kenyon 2010;Delbosc and Mokhtarian 2018); though not all researchers agree with this (Shi et al 2019;Ozbilen, Wang and Akar 2021). Some studies further state that ICTs may make a small number of people's residential locations more flexible due to the redefinition of location accessibility that comes with connectivity to ICTs (Mokhtarian 1991;Shen 2000b).…”