IEDC-2010 Conference Proceedings (Download ... - NED University

2.1 Household description and its travel related needs
Consider a rural household, whose household structure is defined as, household head, household wife and
one or two school going children i.e. this household is of size 3 or 4, and lie at the Life Cycle Stage (LCS)
3 according to the LCS classification of Ali (2000) and Ali and Adnan (2004). The household have its
subsistence types of needs as, water collection, food collection, fire wood collection and health etc, and in
its socio-economic needs include work and schooling (as there are children in the household at school
going age), and the nature of these socio-economic needs is such that they should be performed on daily
basis. There are some other types of needs as well in the household which are categorized in the leisure
type of activities.
2.2 Household level travel decision (Household need threshold and members responsibility)
Now one can assume that in the considered rural household, the need threshold for food collection and
fire wood collection is reached at the threshold value of 15 and 30 days respectively, as there is only one
member which have ability to perform this task i.e. household head. However, need threshold for water
collection may occur frequently and mainly household wife is responsible for this task, some times the
children (school going, normally at age level of 10 to 12 years) are also fulfilled this task. So, for this
household the longer period subsistence needs are mainly responsibility of household head. For socioeconomic
needs, as in the rural circumstances the household wife is unable to work due to stringent
cultural constraint, the household head be the only member in the household, who is responsible to fulfil
this task and this is the most crucial task in his task set as it provides monetary resources within the
household. Furthermore, this need is mostly performed on daily basis, the need threshold for this type of
need is not behave in the fashion as it is for subsistence type of need. The need threshold for this type of
need is defined as the stage at which another household members involves in fulfilment of this need
because of greater monetary requirements of the household or the same member involves him/her self in
part-time work. This definition of need threshold can also be applied for schooling need. This is the
reason why these two types of needs combined in the same category and its need threshold diagrammatic
representation is present in a different way in the conceptual modelling framework. Up to this stage, the
household level decision of travel and the person responsible for this is defined, furthermore household
needs at this stage now converted into individual activities.
2.3 Individual level travel decision (Accessibility problems and time scheduling)
At the individual level, the problem of accessibility is the major constraint to participate in an activity (Ali
2000). This problem of accessibility encountered by an individual either in terms of unavailability of
travel mode, distance of the activity participation centre or in terms of cost required for both travel and
participation in an activity. For example, in the considered rural household, household wife is responsible
for water collection and due to the problem of access, i.e. distance to collection centre or time wasted in
fulfilling this task may cause change in her travel decision, subsequently, this household deprived of this
need or fulfilment of this need in these circumstances may cause serious effect on participation of other
productive activities. This situation analogously applied to other individual of the household that are
responsible for fulfilment of their task. Collectively, due to this accessibility related problems most of the
rural household are deprived of their household needs and the situation results poverty among rural
residents. The developed framework, diagrammatically represents one individual travel decision process,
this similarly applicable for other individual of the households as well by redirecting the framework at the
stage of household role allocation process and this cycle continues to replicate itself for each member in
the household. The whole decision cycle is then repeats itself for all the household of the region which is
under study and after aggregation of the individual travel decisions; population travel demand is finally
obtained.
Proceedings of IEDC 2010, 1-3 July, 2010
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IEDC-2252-108