Chapter 18: Allocation and Valuation of Travel-Time Savings^†

Understanding travel demand is like understanding life itself. The day has 24 hours, and travel time usually consumes a substantial proportion of it. In general, individuals would rather be doing something else, either at home, at work, or elsewhere, than riding a bus or driving a car. Accordingly, travellers would like to reduce the number of trips, to be closer destinations and to reduce travel time for a given trip. Therefore, individuals are willing to pay of that for a travel-time reduction. This has a behavioural dimension that is more a consequence of a general time-allocation problem than an isolated fraud decision. On the other hand, the individual reallocation of time from travel to other activities has a value for “‘society”, either because production increases or simply because the individual is better off and that matters socially. This implies that changes in the transport system that lead to travel-time reductions generate reactions that are important to understand from a behavioural viewpoint, and increase welfare this has to be quantified for social appraisal of projects.