Excess travel in non-commuting trips: a regional case study BOUSSAUW, Kobe; WITLOX, Frank 12 th WCTR, July 11-15, 2010 – Lisbon, Portugal 1 EXCESS TRAVEL IN NON-COMMUTING TRIPS: A REGIONAL CASE STUDY Kobe Boussauw* Frank Witlox Geography Department, Ghent University, Krijgslaan 281/S8, 9000 Gent, Belgium Tel.: +32 9 264 45 55 - Fax.: +32 9 264 49 85 - E-mail: kobe.boussauw@ugent.be * corresponding author ABSTRACT In recent decades, excess commuting has become a major study topic within the discipline of transportation research (Ma and Banister, 2006). Excess commuting is that share of the commute flow (in terms of physical distance or time distance) that cannot be attributed to the spatial separation between job locations and residential locations of employees. In recent years several authors advanced a spatially disaggregated approach as a tool for studying geographic variations in spatial proximity. When this type of research is conducted on a regional scale, it may contribute significantly to the sustainability of proposed land use developments, and to the detection of regions that are considered vulnerable because of their extreme remoteness. To our knowledge, this research framework has only been applied to study home-to-work commuting. Recently, Horner and O'Kelly (2007) suggested that the study of excess travel for non-professional, but more or less, daily trips could become an interesting extension to this. Examples are innumerable: bringing children to day-care or school, doing the groceries, or going to sports or hobby clubs. The study of non-commuting trips, however, entails considerable methodological problems. For instance the capacity of many of the mentioned facilities is fluid, at least in comparison with employment centres that are characterized by a relatively constant number of jobs. Also, even if many non-professional trips are made frequently, they are not made on a daily basis. Moreover, there are often multiple destinations for one single travel purpose, as is, for example, obviously the case for shopping trips. Based on the spatial distribution of some quasi-daily destination classes and reported trip distances from the Travel Behaviour Survey in Flanders, Belgium (OVG) we want to examine regional variations in excess travel in non-professional trips. To this end, we developed for various quasi-daily destination classes (such as shops, schools, public services and leisure activities) a proximity map, pointing out which neighbourhoods or municipalities are within easy reach to these facilities, and which places are, in contrast, located further away from