Telephone Usage and Travel Behaviour in Nigeria

Abstract

The application of telecommunications to travel has changed people’s daily lifestyles by diminishing the time-space constraints and giving virtual accessibility to activity centres. However, the effect of telecommunications on travel behaviour has been a main concern on whether it has complementary or substitution effects. This study explores the relationship between telephone usage and travel behaviour among the staff of Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria. The information for this study was obtained from primary data through the use of structured questionnaire. From the population of 2620 staff, 5% sample size comprising of 131 staff was randomly selected for the questionnaire survey. The findings reveal that most of the staff travels less than 10km for work, shopping and social trips, spend less than 20 minutes journey time and mostly used private cars for commuting to the activities. Furthermore, there is high telephone usage among the staff as about 33% make more than 15 telephone calls per day. The hypothesis test of the relationship between telephone usage and travel shows that the correlation coefficient of 0.181 is significant at 0.047 for substituted trips and 0.226 at 0.013 for complemented trips. The study concludes that there is net substitution and strong complementary effect of telephone usage on travel among the staff.

Keywords: Telephone usage, Travel behaviour, Telecommunications, Complementary, Substitution