Abstract
The value of travel time is an important element in cost-benefit analysis of transportation projects, by encapsulating the willingness to pay of the population for improvements in the transport system. Those values are typically obtained from mobility behavior data from revealed or stated preference surveys. Although short-term decisions are typically used for this purpose, a growing number of authors is arguing that long-term decisions might provide more meaningful values for the evaluation of transportation projects, as those decisions have a longer-lasting effect on the experienced travel times. This paper uses data which contains both short- and long-term experiments to investigate the impact of different time horizons on the valuation of time. Using a joint model including all short term, together with workplace choice situations, the differences in the valuation of time coming from different kinds of experiments are investigated. The results reveal difficulties to isolate the willingness to pay from other aspects of monetary compensation, such as income as a status or career progression symbol. The results confirm that the chosen time horizon has a significant effect on the valuation of travel time and cost. The richer data, compared to previous attempts at such an estimation, does reveal, however, potential pitfalls in the underlying theory, namely that there is a perfect substitution between travel costs and income. In particular, focusing on salary neutral situations instead of situations with salary gains changes the direction of the effect of long term decisions. Recommendations are derived for forthcoming studies.
Highlights
Microeconomic models of time allocation have been used to derive the valuations of techno- logically constrained time use since the work of Becker (1965), Beesley (1965) and DeSerpa (1971)
The value of travel time is an important element in cost-benefit analysis of transportation projects, by encapsulating the willingness to pay of the population for improvements in the transport system
Short-term decisions are typically used for this purpose, a growing number of authors is arguing that long-term decisions might provide more meaningful values for the evaluation of transportation projects, as those decisions have a longer-lasting effect on the experienced travel times
Summary
Microeconomic models of time allocation have been used to derive the valuations of techno- logically constrained time use since the work of Becker (1965), Beesley (1965) and DeSerpa (1971). The values of time are estimated using suitably formulated discrete choice models of travel behavior, especially of route and mode choices Those decisions can be called “short-term”, in the sense that they only have an effect on the decision-maker’s utility for a short time frame. Most value of time studies consider such short-term decisions framing their experiments around a situation where respondents are presented with variations to travel time and cost of different modes or routes Consider for instance the choice of a workplace This choice will have long-lasting consequences on the travel patterns of the decision maker, by changing their choice set for future short-term decisions, over periods of time that are typically several years or even decades long. When estimating willingness-to-pay for policy appraisal, new questions arise: is the focus on short-term
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