Abstract
The value of in-vehicle travel time savings (VT) estimated from mode-choice models has been sometimes found to be higher for private car than for public transportation. This mode-valued variation may seem paradoxical, if public transportation (especially the bus) is perceived as less pleasant than the private car, and because mode-valued differences in the VT cannot be attributed to self-selection. This article describes two alternative microeconomic explanations for this empirical finding. The first follows from noticing that the marginal consumption of goods may depend on travel time, but differently for each mode. A marginal reduction in travel time induces marginal savings in the consumption of goods like fuel or oil, but those marginal savings are perceived by the user only when conditioning on the use of the car. This effect can be explicitly accounted with the inclusion of technical constraints relating goods consumption and time assignment in the microeconomic framework of the VT. The second explanation follows from noticing that the activity schedule does not need to be the same conditional on the use of each mode. Since the car is usually faster and more accessible, a schedule constructed conditional on the use of the car could be more complex, justifying higher values of time as a resource for that mode. The article finishes illustrating the proposed explanations with an example and then summarizing the contributions of this research and proposing lines for further investigation.
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Notes
The model still considers the same coefficient of travel cost for both modes. This implicitly assumes that income effect is negligible and that the money has the same value, regardless of how it is spent. The former assumption would be broken if transportation expenditure is a large share of total income. The latter assumption would no longer hold if the mental account of expenses (see, e.g. Bao et al. 2015) differs between public and private transportation.
Section 4 will add a third element to this list.
See Appendix.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge the valuable comments provided by two anonymous referees and by the attendants of the conferences WCTR2013, PANAMXVII and TUO III, where preliminary ideas developed further in this paper were presented. Of course, all potential errors remain mine. This publication was funded in part by CONICYT, FONDECYT 1150590 and the Complex Engineering Systems Institute, Chile (Grants ICM P-05-004-F, CONICYT FBO16). The final version of this article was prepared when I was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Choice Modelling Centre of the Institute for Transport Studies of the University of Leeds, UK, with partial funding provided by a Leverhulme’s Visiting Professorship.
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Appendix: derivation of Eqs. (11) and (12)
Appendix: derivation of Eqs. (11) and (12)
Deriving the lagrangian \( \ell \) in Eq. (10) with respect to the leisure activities “being at home” and “being at the coffee shop”
and thus
Then, considering that \( T_{TravelC} = t_{IV} \) and that \( T_{Home}^{{}} + T_{CS}^{{}} + T_{TravelC} = \tau - \bar{\tau } \), it results that \( \tau - \bar{\tau } - t_{IV} = T_{{Home^{{}} }}^{{}} + \left( {\frac{{\alpha_{H} }}{{\alpha_{CS} }}} \right)^{{\frac{1}{\rho - 1}}} T_{{Home^{{}} }}^{{}} \), arriving at Eq. (11)
from which \( T_{Home} \) and \( T_{CS} \) can be calculated given that \( \tau - \bar{\tau },t_{IV} ,\alpha_{CS} ,\alpha_{H} ,\rho \) are known.
Regarding, Eq. (12) first, as it was shown before, \( \mu = \alpha_{H} \rho T_{Home}^{\rho - 1} \; \) is obtained by deriving \( \ell \) with respect to T Home . \( \frac{\partial U}{{\partial T_{TravelC} }} = \alpha_{TC} \rho T_{TravelC}^{\rho - 1} \; \) is obtained deriving the utility by \( T_{TravelC} \). \( F = \gamma T_{TravelC} \; \) is assumed to hold. \( G = I - \bar{G} - P_{F} F - c_{IV} - c_{CS} \;\quad \) is obtained re-arranging terms of the budget constraint. \( \psi = \lambda P_{F} - \alpha_{F} \rho F_{{}}^{\rho - 1} \; \) is obtained by deriving \( \ell \) with respect to F. \( \lambda = \alpha_{G} \rho G^{\rho - 1} \; \) is obtained by deriving \( \ell \) with respect to G. Finally, \( \kappa = \mu - \frac{\partial U}{{\partial T_{TravelC} }} + \gamma \psi \;\quad \) is obtained deriving \( \ell \) with respect to T TravelC .
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Guevara, C.A. Mode-valued differences of in-vehicle travel time Savings. Transportation 44, 977–997 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-016-9689-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-016-9689-3