Analysis of the interaction between destination and departure time choices

Departure time and destination choices are interrelated decisions that affect the demand estimation for urban transportation. A majority of the previous studies have ignored this interrelation and regarded these decisions as independent. On the contrary, some other studies have utilized a hierarchy structure; however, the literature suggested that destination and departure time should be simultaneously selected before the commencing of trips. The present study employed a joint model using the copula functions to explore the interdependency between the destination and departure time choices. The destination choice modeling was developed using a multinomial logit model, and a binary logit model was used for modeling the departure time choice. To obtain a better fitted joint model, some copulas were utilized and then, the frank copula was selected for the final model. The obtained results indicated that there were some common unobserved factors between these decisions by estimating the copula dependence parameters with high statistical significance. Furthermore, there were some commonly observed factors such as socio-demographic and travel characteristics that appeared in the utility functions of both models.