2025 PSR UTC Annual Congress

Exploring the Significance of Care Trips in the Mobility of Care
Transportation systems have historically prioritized work trips while neglecting care trips—essential trips made to meet caregiving responsibilities and sustain household needs, such as picking-up/dropping-off children, grocery shopping, and doing errands. Using data from the 2022 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS), this study examines the significance of care trips in daily travel based on people's time allocation and the socio-demographics associated with care trips. As an initial finding, care trips make up the majority of trips people take. An analysis on time allocation across trip types using the Multiple Discrete-Continuous Extreme Value (MDCEV) model further reveals that even employed people (who typically make routine work trips) make more care-related trips than work trips. The model also reveals that employment status emerges as a stronger predictor than gender. Key groups in society who dedicate more time to care trips than others are unemployed, people with children, and women in multi-adult households with children — people who are less likely to engage in work trips. Given the significant time investment in care trips, policymakers and planners could integrate care trips into travel demand management programs, public transit services, and infrastructure design. Integration of care trips to these programs would ensure inclusive transportation for people who take more care trips than others. Moreover, encouraging mixed-use land development is critical, and promoting zero-emission family-friendly vehicles may be helpful.

How do Couples Divide Their Mobility of Care?
The unequal distribution of caregiving responsibilities between women and men extends to transportation, placing a heavier burden on women’s time and mobility compared to men. Care trips, a quantifiable representation of “mobility of care”, define all trips performed to pursue care-related activities, such as grocery shopping, escorting children, and doing errands. However, this gendered participation in care trips is at an aggregate level without particular attention to how care-related travel is divided within individual households. Therefore, we investigate how household structure moderates time allocation for care trips among partnered men and women within the same households, utilizing the Multiple Discrete Continuous Extreme Value (MDCEV) model with data from the 2022 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS). We find that the influence of gender, the presence of household children, and employment status on time spent traveling for care diminishes when these factors interact with one another. “Mothers” (i.e. women with children) are more likely to engage in care trips than non-mothers. “Traditional housewives” (i.e. unemployed women with employed male partners/spouses) also spend more time traveling for care than non-housewives. Conversely, employed women with unemployed male partners/spouses tend to spend less time in care travel than others, suggesting a potential shift in care travel responsibilities to the male partner. Notably, when both partners share the same employment status, they tend to spend a similar amount of time on care trips. These findings underscore the importance of incorporating care trips into commute-centric transportation systems for a more inclusive approach.