IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/transa/v39y2005i2-3p257-276.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Travel time use in the information age

Author

Listed:
  • Lyons, Glenn
  • Urry, John

Abstract

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, albeit acknowledging an interdependency. 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 might be emerging in the 'information age'. Such undermining of the division between activities and travelling, and between activity time and travel time, may have major implications for future levels of mobility, for the modal distribution of travel, for the validity of current transport appraisal methodology and for the analysis of travelling within the information age. These issues are considered.

Suggested Citation

  • Lyons, Glenn & Urry, John, 2005. "Travel time use in the information age," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 39(2-3), pages 257-276.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:transa:v:39:y:2005:i:2-3:p:257-276
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0965-8564(04)00097-7
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Mimi Sheller & John Urry, 2000. "The City and the Car," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 24(4), pages 737-757, December.
    2. Mokhtarian, Patricia L. & Salomon, Ilan, 2001. "How derived is the demand for travel? Some conceptual and measurement considerations," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 35(8), pages 695-719, September.
    3. Salomon, Ilan & Mokhtarian, Patricia, 1998. "What Happens When Mobility-Inclined Market Segments Face Accessibility-Enhancing Policies?," Institute of Transportation Studies, Working Paper Series qt2x75525j, Institute of Transportation Studies, UC Davis.
    4. Schafer, Andreas, 1998. "The global demand for motorized mobility," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 32(6), pages 455-477, August.
    5. Schwanen, Tim & Dijst, Martin, 2002. "Travel-time ratios for visits to the workplace: the relationship between commuting time and work duration," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 36(7), pages 573-592, August.
    6. Jarach, David, 2001. "The evolution of airport management practices: towards a multi-point, multi-service, marketing-driven firm," Journal of Air Transport Management, Elsevier, vol. 7(2), pages 119-125.
    7. Schafer, Andreas & Victor, David G., 2000. "The future mobility of the world population," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 34(3), pages 171-205, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Tapio, Petri, 2005. "Towards a theory of decoupling: degrees of decoupling in the EU and the case of road traffic in Finland between 1970 and 2001," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 12(2), pages 137-151, March.
    2. Mokhtarian, Patricia L. & Chen, Cynthia, 2004. "TTB or not TTB, that is the question: a review and analysis of the empirical literature on travel time (and money) budgets," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 38(9-10), pages 643-675.
    3. Longden, Thomas, 2016. "The Regularity and Irregularity of Travel: an Analysis of the Consistency of Travel Times Associated with Subsistence, Maintenance and Discretionary Activities," ET: Economic Theory 243150, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM).
    4. Peeters, Paul & Dubois, Ghislain, 2010. "Tourism travel under climate change mitigation constraints," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 18(3), pages 447-457.
    5. Tang, Jia & Mokhtarian, Patricia L. & Zhen, Feng, 2020. "How do passengers allocate and evaluate their travel time? Evidence from a survey on the Shanghai–Nanjing high speed rail corridor, China," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 85(C).
    6. Iragaël Joly & Stéphanie Vincent-Geslin, 2016. "Intensive travel time: an obligation or a choice?," Post-Print halshs-01309467, HAL.
    7. Joly, I., 2011. "Test of the relation between travel and activities times : different representations of a demand derived from activity participation," Working Papers 201103, Grenoble Applied Economics Laboratory (GAEL).
    8. Carreira, Rui & Patrício, Lia & Natal Jorge, Renato & Magee, Chris & Van Eikema Hommes, Qi, 2013. "Towards a holistic approach to the travel experience: A qualitative study of bus transportation," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 25(C), pages 233-243.
    9. Tae‐Hyoung Tommy Gim, 2020. "The relationship between overall happiness and perceived transportation services relative to other individual and environmental variables," Growth and Change, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 51(2), pages 712-733, June.
    10. Iragaël Joly, 2006. "The role of travel time budgets – Representation of a demand derived from activity participation," Post-Print halshs-00181431, HAL.
    11. Hess, Stephane & Bierlaire, Michel & Polak, John W., 2005. "Estimation of value of travel-time savings using mixed logit models," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 39(2-3), pages 221-236.
    12. Vincent Viguié, 2015. "Cross-commuting and housing prices in a polycentric modeling of cities," Working Papers 2015.09, FAERE - French Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.
    13. Jahun Koo & Jiyoon Kim & Sungtaek Choi & Sangho Choo, 2022. "Identifying the Causal Relationship between Travel and Activity Times: A Structural Equation Modeling Approach," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(8), pages 1-18, April.
    14. De Vos, Jonas & Witlox, Frank, 2013. "Transportation policy as spatial planning tool; reducing urban sprawl by increasing travel costs and clustering infrastructure and public transportation," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 33(C), pages 117-125.
    15. Milakis, Dimitris & Cervero, Robert & van Wee, Bert & Maat, Kees, 2015. "Do people consider an acceptable travel time? Evidence from Berkeley, CA," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 44(C), pages 76-86.
    16. Handy, Susan L, 2002. "Accessibility- vs. Mobility-Enhancing Strategies for Addressing Automobile Dependence in the U.S," Institute of Transportation Studies, Working Paper Series qt5kn4s4pb, Institute of Transportation Studies, UC Davis.
    17. Ory, David T, 2007. "Structural Equation Modeling of Relative Desired Travel Amounts," Institute of Transportation Studies, Working Paper Series qt8mj659fp, Institute of Transportation Studies, UC Davis.
    18. Mokhtarian, Patricia L & Salomon, Ilan & S, Lothlorien, 2001. "Understanding the Demand for Travel: It's Not Purely 'Derived'," University of California Transportation Center, Working Papers qt5bh2d8mh, University of California Transportation Center.
    19. Marco Diana & Tingting Song & Knut Wittkowski, 2009. "Studying travel-related individual assessments and desires by combining hierarchically structured ordinal variables," Transportation, Springer, vol. 36(2), pages 187-206, March.
    20. Ory, David T. & Mokhtarian, Patricia L., 2005. "When is getting there half the fun? Modeling the liking for travel," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 39(2-3), pages 97-123.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:transa:v:39:y:2005:i:2-3:p:257-276. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/547/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.