Worthwhile Travel Time: The Perceived Value of Productivity, Enjoyment and Fitness While Travelling

Abstract

By tradition transport appraisal relies primarily on travel time saving and monetary values. Assessment tools rarely factor in the perspective of travellers in terms of their subjective travel experience while on the move. However, the experience of travel time increasingly matters, particularly due to the enabling use of mobile ICT, but also because of emerging trends for diversification in personal transport options and the global need to shift to more sustainable mobility patterns. The question this paper addresses is how the ‘worthwhile use of travel time’ can be conceptualised and unpacked, so that it can be more adequately captured, either via traditional paper-based travel surveys, interviews, or novel app-based methods. Based on a selected interdisciplinary literature review on the topic of worthwhile travel time and its variants in social science, psychology, policy, health sciences, and economics, the paper introduces a conceptual and analytical framework showing the linkages between worthwhile versus wasted time, travel activities, experience factors, and other explanatory variables at play. It also makes the case for three main values of worthwhileness: Enjoyment, Productivity and Fitness. The paper demonstrates the framework by presenting aggregate survey results from the app-based MoTiV project open dataset consisting of 64098 multimodal door-to-door trips across Europe. Although hands-off mobile app survey results and quantitative analysis can only provide a partial picture of this complex behavioural topic, the data shows overall that in door-to-door trips, from the perspective of travellers, the quality of travel time matters. The main value derived from travelling is Enjoyment, with Fitness taking a particularly high value for active modes. Paid work ranked comparatively low in value, even when it is most expected to take place. These findings may challenge conventional assessment tools and methods used in transport appraisal that assume that travel time is wasted, or that saved time on work trips are necessarily reallocated to paid and productive tasks.