South Koreans work for the longest hours among OECD member states. Lack of discretionary time due to such long working hours becomes a serious social issue as they are related to the quality of life. It is however difficult to directly correlate the work duration to the quality of life. Rather, it is more informative to know how people use time for activities other than work under time pressure when evaluating the quality of life. Travel is derived from such activities that are constrained under time pressure. This paper aims to explore how work duration affects activity patterns by analyzing travel behavior. To this end, the study identified trip chain types using the 2010 Household Travel Survey (HTS) of Seoul Metropolitan Area (SMA). The findings show that trip chain types were associated with different work durations and activity patterns. The distribution of such associations differs between geographical areas in SMA. The results suggest that travel behavior analysis is crucial to measuring the quality of life given the relationships between work duration and flexible activities.
