| dc.description.abstract | The aging society caused by the demographic transition has a number of important consequences for mobility. Although there has been a lot of research to the mobility of the elderly, very little is known about the effect of weather conditions on mobility of the elderly; therefore (next to personal and household characteristics) this research adapted a more specific focus on weather conditions. The research analyzed the mode choice and the number of trips of 147 elderly respondents living within the greater Rotterdam area by using a combination of different datasets (personal and household characteristics, travel diaries, built environment statistics and weather conditions). The regression models show that car ownership, gender, educational attainment, ethnicity, owning a public transport card and bicycle availability might significantly influence mode choice. For the number of trips, significant effects were found for age, bicycle availability and owning a public transport. Concerning weather conditions, results indicate significant negative effects of wind speed on the use of all transport modes other than the car, significant positive effects of the daily air temperature on cycling compared to the car, and significant negative effects for precipitation sum on the number of trips. Despite these results, it should be noted that the sample as a whole was not representative for the entire study area and that the explained variance for the number of trips remained relatively low. | |
