Examining the efficiency of peak and off-peak travel patterns using excess travel and travel economy measures

In recent years there has been an increase in the level of attention being paid to the empirical difference between observed travel patterns and those necessitated by the distribution of jobs and housing in urban areas. In the academic literature, this issue has been investigated fairly extensively within the context of the excess commuting and commuting economy frameworks in various city-regions. Within these frameworks, one area that has received considerably less attention is the case of off-peak travel which is used as a proxy for non-work travel. Accordingly, the current research specifically addresses this period using the city-region of Dublin, Ireland as a case study. The approach uses data from an urban traffic simulation model to determine the minimum, maximum and random travel costs for the study area which are compared with observed costs. The results show that non-work travel is associated with more efficient travel behaviour driven by the intermixing of land use arrangements associated with these trip types and the transport network. They also show that there are only slight improvements in the efficiency of off-peak travel over the time horizon but considerable
improvement during the peak period as a result of the extent of jobs decentralisation.