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Travel time budgets: new evidence from multi-year, multi-day data

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Abstract

The existence of stable personal travel-time expenditure has been debated for more than 40 years. Aggregate research has supported this notion, while disaggregate research has largely failed to find evidence. In this paper, a unique data set containing multi-day GPS measurements of travel time expenditures over a period from 5 to 8 years is used to examine the evidence for stable daily personal travel-time expenditures. The evidence from this study adds further support to the notion that people expend a stable amount of travel time over a period as long as 8 years, and the average level of such expenditure accords almost exactly with that claimed over the years from aggregate studies.

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Stopher, P.R., Ahmed, A. & Liu, W. Travel time budgets: new evidence from multi-year, multi-day data. Transportation 44, 1069–1082 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-016-9694-6

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