Comparing Swiss and French time-use – Attempt of new methodologies

In an effort to question the transferability of the regularities in patterns of activities, we propose to compare the activities patterns of four French cities and three Swiss cities. For each city, two households mobility surveys describe the individual out-of-home activities pattern, collected during the 80's and the 90's.After a discussion of the mean patterns of activities (work and study, shopping, personal business and leisure), the paper explores the time-use with respect of the socio-economics attributes and mobility characteristics (mode use, distance, number of trips,...). In an attempt to explore spatial differentiation of the activity patterns, GIS tool will be used for the French cities. It will permit to spatially compare representative time-use of a zone with its socio-economic profile.Lastly, in order to take into account the asymmetry of the distribution characterising the activity duration, the duration model framework will be applied. From a methodological point of view, only the first step of this analysis will be proposed : the non-parametric estimation. It permits to analyse the duration of each activity type and to test the impacts of socio-economic variables on the duration variable and to explore the dependence of the duration on elapsed time.