ICT FOR LIFE

1 Introduction

Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) provide people alternatives
to face-to-face communication and thus have the potentials to substitute physical
travel. These potentials are particularly appealing for policy makers and planners
who have been desperately looking for ways to mitigate traffic congestion. They
have also motivated a great number of studies on the transportation impacts of ICT.
These studies have greatly contributed to our understanding of the possible andpotential impacts of ICT on physical travel. However, as will be argued in the next
section, more empirical studies, which consider the interactions between activities
and travel, are needed to substantiate the complex direct and indirect effects of ICT
on travel (Mokhtarian 2003). The objective of this paper is to make such a contribution.
We shall apply the activity-based framework to probe into the impacts of
ICT on activity and travel behavior by identifying the causal relationships between
ICT usage, time allocation and travel behavior. Particularly, we will differentiate the
direct and indirect effects of ICT on trip generation and travel time. Further, we will
adopt the comprehensive approach, i.e., instead of focusing on specific ICT application
such as telecommuting or e-shopping, the study will define ICT in a broad
sense as the experience with the use of Internet, e-mail and videophone, etc. Specifically,
the following questions are investigated: (a) how does the use of ICT directly
affect travel behavior in terms of daily trip numbers and travel time? (b) what
are the indirect effects of ICT on travel through time allocation among subsistence,
maintenance and recreation activities? (c) how are the ICT users socio-economically
characterized? Are gender, income, age, and other socio-economic factors important
determinants of ICT usage? To answer these questions, it is important to consider
the interactions between activity participation and travel pattern. We therefore
employ the structural equations modeling framework. The sample is derived from
the 2002 travel characteristics survey of Hong Kong.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The next section will review the
studies on the transportation impacts of ICT. Section 3 explains the methodology
and data. Modeling results are presented and explained in Section 4. The final
section discusses the implications of findings and lists future research directions.