Valuation of travel time

After decades of study, the value of travel time remains incompletely understood and ripe for further theoretical and empirical investigation. Research has revealed many regularities and connections between willingness to pay for time savings and other economic factors including time of day choice, aversion to unreliability, labor supply, taxation, activity scheduling, intra-household time allocation, and out-of-office productivity. Some of these connections have been addressed through sophisticated modeling, revealing a plethora of reasons for heterogeneity in value of time rooted in behavior at a micro scale. This paper reviews what we know and what we need to know. A recurrent theme is that the value of time for a particular travel movement depends strongly on very specific factors, and that understanding how these factors work will provide new insights into travel behavior and into more general economic choices.

► The focus is on conceptual issues, ramifications, and research gaps. ► Basic theory and well-known empirical regularities are reviewed. ► Understanding heterogeneity is a key to insights value of time. ► Variation by time of day is closely connected to trip scheduling and value of reliability. ► Travelers value time changes asymmetrically around a reference point.