analysis of the interaction between destination and departure time choices

Destination and departure time choices are interrelated decisions that affect urban travel demand estimation. most previous studies ignore this interrelation and assume that these decisions are independent. some other studies use a hierarchy structure, while the literature suggests that destination and departure time are selected simultaneously before the commencing of trips. this paper employs copulabased joint modeling to explore the interdependency between destination and departure time choices. the destination choice modeling is developed using a multinomial logit model, and a binary logit model is used for modeling departure time choice. to obtain a betterfitted model, several copula functions are used thereafter; the frank copula is selected for the final model. results show that there are some common unobserved factors between these decisions by estimating copula dependence parameters with high statistical significance. furthermore, there are some commonly observed factors, such as socio-demographic and travel characteristics that appear in the utility functions of both models.