The Use and Value of Travel Time

This paper, focused primarily on UK data and debates, considers the potential significance of travel time use within past, present and future patterns of mobility. In transport scheme appraisal, savings in travel time typically represent a substantial proportion of the benefits of a scheme – benefits used to justify its often enormous financial costs. Such benefits are founded on the assumption that travel time is unproductive, wasted time ‘in-between’ ‘real’ activities and which should be minimised. Travel demand analysis treats travel time and activity time as separate. The paper challenges these approaches by exploring how travel time can be, and is, being used ‘productively’ as activity time, and what enhancements to time use are emerging in the ‘information age’. Recent research from the UK is drawn upon to examine the degree to which some work activities are undertaken ‘on the move’, the increasing range of friendship, leisure and fun activities also occurring while moving, and the important communications that take place in movement including arrangements concerning the nature and form of ‘meetings’. These various developments have implications for future levels of mobility, for the modal distribution of travel, for the validity of current transport appraisal methodology, and for undermining the conventional divide between transport and communications.