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What makes travel pleasant and/or tiring? An investigation based on the French National Travel Survey

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Abstract

The 2007–2008 French National Travel Survey (FNTS) included questions about the trip experience for a random subsample of the respondents’ daily travel, offering a rare opportunity to examine a national profile of attitudes toward travel. This study analyzes the self-reported (mental and/or physical) fatigue associated with the selected trip, and its (un)pleasantness. Only 8 % of trips were tiring, and fewer than 4 % were unpleasant, indicating that travel is by no means universally distasteful. We present a bivariate probit model of the mental and physical fatigue associated with the trip, and binary logit models of whether the trip was pleasant (yes/no) or unpleasant (yes/no). For the most part, socioeconomic variables and indicators of trip length, distance, purpose, and mode have logical relationships to fatigue and pleasantness. However, 11 variables out of 31 common to both sets of models have impacts on fatigue that are opposite to those on un/pleasantness, pointing to conditions under which a trip can be fatiguing but pleasant, or conversely. Accordingly, a key contribution of the research is to demonstrate the value of jointly considering both constructs in order to more comprehensively capture the overall attitudes toward the travelling activity. It is also of interest that activities conducted during the trip appear in both sets of models. In particular, the results suggest that although listening to the radio/music decreases the tendency to rate the trip as mentally fatiguing, it tends to be seen as ameliorating the disutility of a tedious trip more than increasing the pleasantness of the trip. Among the policy-relevant findings, we note the especially negative attitudes towards multimodal trips and trips mainly involving driving cars.

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Notes

  1. Of course, in some contexts, notably those of holiday travel or journeys of self-discovery, such a perspective is not at all new. The novelty of the development described here lies in the application of some of those same principles to the ordinary travel of everyday life.

  2. We are indebted to a reviewer for this observation.

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Acknowledgments

Model development and other analyses were conducted by the third author while performing an internship at the University of California, Davis. This internship was funded by the École Nationale des Travaux Publics de l’État (ENTPE). The authors wish also to thank Jimmy Armoogum and Zehir Kolli from IFSTTAR for their help in the interpretation and processing of the FNTS dataset, and four anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on a previous version of this manuscript. Preliminary findings from this research were presented at the 13th IATBR (International Association for Travel Behaviour Research) Conference in Toronto, Canada, July 15–20, 2012.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 790 Atlantic Drive, Atlanta, GA, 30332, USA

    Patricia L. Mokhtarian

  2. Laboratory Economic and Social Dynamics of Transport (DEST), Department for Planning, Mobility and Environment (AME), French Institute of Science and Technology for Transport, Development and Networks (IFSTTAR), 14-20 Boulevard Newton B506, Cité Descartes, Champs sur Marne, F-77447, Marne La Vallée Cedex 2, France

    Francis Papon

  3. Bureau du Pilotage de la Tutelle des Établissements Publics Ministère de l’Écologie, du Développement Durable et de l’Énergie, Ministère du Logement, de l’Égalité des Territoires et de la Ruralité, SG/SPES/PPST3, Tour Pascal A, Bureau 17.47, 92055, La Défense Cedex, France

    Matthieu Goulard

  4. Department of Environment, Land and Infrastructure Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi, 24, 10129, Turin, Italy

    Marco Diana

Authors
  1. Patricia L. Mokhtarian
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  2. Francis Papon
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Correspondence to Patricia L. Mokhtarian.

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Mokhtarian, P.L., Papon, F., Goulard, M. et al. What makes travel pleasant and/or tiring? An investigation based on the French National Travel Survey. Transportation 42, 1103–1128 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-014-9557-y

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