Worthwhile travel time: a conceptual framework of the perceived value of enjoyment, productivity and fitness while travelling

ABSTRACT

By tradition, transport appraisal relies primarily on travel time savings and monetary values. Assessment tools rarely factor in the perspective of travellers in terms of their subjective travel experience while on the move. Worthwhile travel time introduces the idea that travel can be pleasant, meaningful or worthwhile and not exclusively associated with the economic utility of the activity at the destination of the trip and the work-related productivity during the trip. This paper explores how the “worthwhile use of travel time” can be conceptualised and unpacked, so that it can be adequately captured and integrated into transport appraisal practice. We reviewed the literature on worthwhile travel time and perceived travel experience in psychology, economics, public health and travel behaviour research and we formulated the conceptual framework of worthwhile travel time that is grounded on the traveller’s perception of three forms of value emerging from existing literature: enjoyment, productivity, and health. Our conceptual framework of worthwhile travel time suggests that experience factors (i.e. travel conditions as experienced by the traveller) can enable travel activities (i.e. the trip itself or activities on-the-move), which in turn unlock the values of enjoyment, productivity and fitness that influence the perceived worthwhileness of a trip to a different degree each. Additional (explanatory) factors such as the door-to-door trip characteristics, the traveller’s personal characteristics and attitude, and the spatial and temporal conditions can also influence the perceived worthwhileness of a trip. On a policy level, the integration of the worthwhile travel time concept into transport appraisal practice could allow future transport investments to offer a better balance between reduced travel times and improved quality and experience of a trip for the traveller.

KEYWORDS:

• Worthwhile travel time
• value of travel time
• travel experience
• transport appraisal
• multimodal transport
• conceptual framework

Acknowledgements

We thank all colleagues and partners in the MoTiV project for their valuable input, and Eva Malichová, Cristian Consonni, Silvia Basile and Matteo Manca for assisting with data analysis and visualisations. We also thank Aditya Gujaran and João Bernardino for their support in conceptualizing and designing a mobile app interface for WTT. We are grateful to the three anonymous reviewers and the editor for their feedback, which contributed to increase the quality of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The dataset has been collected within the Horizon 2020 (H2020) project MoTiV and it complies with the H2020 regulation, MoTiV, Grant Agreement, EU/General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), data protection legislation of the countries involved, and the European Research Code of Conduct for Research Integrity. Participants explicitly provided consent for the data collection through the app. Internal deliverables related to Ethics and Data Protection were approved by an independent Ethics Committee established for the project.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was realised with support of the Operational Program Integrated Infrastructure 2014-2020 of the project: "Value of travel time from an individual traveller’s perspective“ (MOBITIME) [grant number ITMS2014+ 313011T241], co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund.