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The digital revolution and worthwhile use of travel time: implications for appraisal and forecasting

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Abstract

Savings in travel time and more specifically their monetary value typically constitute the main benefit to justify major investment in transport schemes. However, worthwhile use of travel time is an increasingly prominent phenomenon of the digital age. Accordingly, questions are increasingly being asked regarding whether values of time used by countries around the world based on their appraisal approaches are too high. This paper offers the most comprehensive examination of our theoretical and empirical understandings of international appraisal approaches and how they account for worthwhile use of travel time. It combines the economics perspective with wider social science insight and reaches the conclusion that past revolutions in transport that have made longer and quicker journeys possible are now joined by a digital revolution that is reducing the disutility of travel time. This revolution offers potential economic benefit that comes at a fraction of the cost of major investments in transport that are predicated on saving travel time. The paper highlights the challenges faced in both current and indeed potential alternative future appraisal approaches. Such challenges are rooted in the difficulty of measuring time use and productivity with sufficient accuracy and over time to credibly account for how travel time factors into the economic outcomes from social and working practices in the knowledge economy. There is a need for further research to: establish how improvements in the opportunities for and the quality of worthwhile use of travel time impact on the valuation of travel time savings for non-business travel; improve our understanding of how productive use of time impacts on the valuation of time savings for business travellers; and estimate how these factors have impacted on the demand for different modes of travel.

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Notes

  1. Indeed, on train journeys, for example, it can be rare to observe anyone not undertaking such activities!

  2. Fowkes et al. (1986) distinguished between p, which is the marginal amount of working time displaced by a time saving, and what they termed p*, which represents the average amount of time spent working while travelling.

  3. By this we mean a full WTP basis for the official recommendations. However, the employee element of the Hensher Equation, employed in the Swedish and Dutch official values, is based on WTP.

  4. These can be regarded as those sponsored by government bodies with the explicit aim of informing official recommendations and guidance.

  5. We should though point out that from our extensive experience we are not aware of any study that has explicitly examined the impact of the worthwhile use of time on the value of time savings for non-business travel (VTTS), and contacting numerous leading practitioners in the area on this issue drew a blank.

  6. Studies do not always set out the full range of covariates that had been tested. An additional dimension, although not relevant here, is the considerable amount of attention that has been paid to the size and sign of time and cost variations.

  7. Although, of course, the extent to which there is a tendency for reported values from separate studies to be consistent with the ‘conventional wisdom’ will tend to confirm ‘expected’ variations in VTTS over time at the expense of a dampening effect from reductions in VTTS attributable to improvements in the opportunity and quality of worthwhile time use.

  8. Nash (2014) provides evidence on how rail demand in mainland Europe has grown over the period of the financial crisis between 2007 and 2011. Demand growth (and GDP changes in brackets) were: Germany 7 % (0 %); France 11 % (−1.5 %); Netherlands −4 % (−0.4 %); Spain 4 % (−3.1 %); Switzerland 15 % (+3 %); Belgium 5 % (0.5 %) and Sweden 11 % (1 %).

  9. Some very useful research might be conducted to test our speculation, and compare the benefits from time savings with the benefits (once quantified) of being able to spend time more usefully.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank to Richard Batley, Jonas Eliasson, James Laird, Peter Mackie and John Bates who have contributed to our understanding of issues discussed here. A Department for Transport funded scoping study into how travel time savings in the course of business trips might be valued provided an impetus to this paper, and we are grateful to Dan Thomas and Jake Cartmell of the Department for insight and guidance as part of that project. All views expressed here though are those of the authors.

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  1. Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK

    Mark Wardman

  2. Centre for Transport and Society, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK

    Glenn Lyons

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Correspondence to Mark Wardman.

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Wardman, M., Lyons, G. The digital revolution and worthwhile use of travel time: implications for appraisal and forecasting. Transportation 43, 507–530 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-015-9587-0

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