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An increasing amount of travel, both long- and short-distance trips, is made in private vehicles for recreation. Peak congestion around attractions and leisure spots can be worse than congestion in the city center during peak periods. Moreover, recreational travel within, to, and through metropolitan areas contributes to congestion problems and points to the need for its incorporation into travel forecasting. The importance of leisure travel in state economies raises the question of why this segment of travel is not more often studied. The 1995 American Travel Survey and the 1995 Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey are used to examine the characteristics of recreational trips by private vehicle. Recreational trips by other modes, such as transit and airplane, are not included. Data from the surveys show that private vehicle recreation trips make up about 14 percent of all local trips, 23 percent of all long-distance trips, and 15 percent of total vehicle kilometers traveled on U.S. roads. Recreation trips are not equally distributed among all groups of people, however. African Americans report about half the amount of recreational automobile trips and one-third the average kilometers as whites. Other differences by race or ethnicity indicate that Hispanic families tend to travel in larger groups than African Americans or whites. Age, too, is a determining factor in the amount and type of recreational travel. Both the young and the old make more trips on a daily basis, but they make far fewer long-distance trips than those in middle age.

Research on women’s mobility has focused mostly on local travel, partly as a result of data availability. Women’s long-distance travel, defined as trips over 161 km (100 mi) one way, is examined, with data from the 1995 American Travel Survey (ATS). Conducted for the Bureau of Transportation Statistics by the Bureau of the Census, the ATS collected information on the origin, destination, volume, and characteristics of long-distance travel from 80,000 households in the United States. Data are presented on women’s long-distance travel disaggregated by, among other things, trip purpose, trip mode, age, race/ethnicity, and household type. Where possible and appropriate, ATS data are compared with data from 1977, the last time such a survey was conducted. The data show women made fewer long-distance trips than men in 1995 and the disparity between the sexes is virtually unchanged since 1977. About 80 percent of the difference in trip making results from men taking more than twice the number of business trips as women, despite women’s business travel having grown faster than men’s over the past 18 years. Most of the rest of the difference results from men’s greater trip making for outdoor recreation. Differences in long-distance travel behavior can be explained, to a degree, by women’s lower income, lower employment rates, and lower driver’s licensing rate, and because women are more likely to be the primary caregivers for children whether they work outside of the home or not.