Physical inactivity has become a dominant feature of most American’s lives over the past quarter century. This has spurred an entire research domain straddling several different disciplines. Although model development within the field of travel behavior as a whole continues today with more momentum than ever, the focus on active mode choice has largely been overlooked and left to a small fragment of transportation and public health researchers. Research regarding active mode choice has been primarily conducted outside the field of travel behavior and has utilized research methods designed for other purposes. This leads to results which address behavioral causality in a superficial way while also neglecting the role of residential self-selection. This paper provides an overview of existing travel behavior analysis regarding active mode choice, presents potential threats to validity in this type of research, and critiques existing intervention methodologies. Additionally, a conceptual model of active travel behavior is presented and the roots of each component are discussed. By applying the rigor of travel behavior research to the subfield of active travel behavior research, and incorporating the conceptual model provided, great strides can be made relatively quickly in understanding animate mode choice and active travel behavior.

Many studies have examined the impact that the built environment has on physical activity, and much of the existing research posits that if communities will provide and improve active infrastructure such as trails, sidewalks, and bike lanes, people will become more physically active. However, most of these studies have used cross-sectional methods which have allowed them to establish correlations but not behavioral causality. In this pilot project a longitudinal design is used to evaluate the impact neighborhood trail development to assess a trail construction impact on active travel behavior and overall physical activity among suburban residents. A sample of suburban residents in West Valley City, Utah was surveyed both before and after the construction of a class-one trail in their neighborhood using a preliminary household survey, individual activity diaries completed at three pre-assigned time points (before and twice after the trail’s construction), new resident surveys, and a trail user’s intercept survey. This intervention technique performs a more direct test of causality by looking at the same group of residents over time and analyzing if individual changes in behavior occur following the construction of the trail. In the paper we show that trail neighborhood residents did not use the facility after it was build, new residents did not move to the neighborhood because of the trail, and the users of the trail come from elsewhere. We also report trail amenities that appear to be more desirable.

The past century’s radical change, innovation in transportation technology and concomitant increase in options for our travel modes moves us away from walking to an almost total extinction of modes that require physical exercise. This is accompanied by a modern American city design that requires the use of an automobile with urban sprawl creating distant destinations that alter older methods of travel and make active forms of transportation almost impossible. However, many more reasons exist that motivate people to choose physically inactive modes as our research shows here. Using a two-day activity diary collected in Centre County Pennsylvania, we identify which factors influence active versus inactive mode choice. In this analysis, we examine the correlation between trip purpose and travel mode, the correlation between age and travel mode, and perform an analysis of travel distances to determine what the distance threshold is for active modes. In addition, a latent class cluster analysis establishes a profile for both physically active as well as inactive travelers and their correlation with person and household characteristics. Key findings include that trips made using active modes are significantly different than trips made by inactive modes and persons with active transportation lifestyles are significantly different than persons with inactive lifestyles. This raises the following issue: policies designed for and motivated by persons with active lifestyles risk to fail if they do not succeed in meeting the needs for everyday life of those with inactive lifestyles.