How the Presence of Children Affects Parents' Travel Behavior

Abstract

The impact of having child on the parents and on the rest of the family is already well studied in different domains. The step from two adults towards a family with two adults and one child brings along a lot of consequences. The effects are related to changes in time use, changes in the work situation, differences in composition and size of social networks. Notwithstanding the fact that this key event is quite well studied in the past, the effects on parents' travel behavior are not. In this paper we found prove for the hypothesis that the arrival of a child affects parents' travel behavior. Evidence for the hypothesis is found using a large travel behavior study, where differences in trip making, number of trips and distance traveled are considered. Not only the presence of children has an effect, it was also found that the age of the (youngest) child influences parents' travel behavior strongly and this up to the age of 16 years. Moreover, the influence on parents' travel is different for mothers and fathers: in particular mothers take care for the transportation of the children. Secondly, from an exploratory study with couples before and after childbirth, the differences between men and women point out that women become some kind of “taxi driver” of the child, even shortly after birth.