The Psychological Value of Time

Much research in the field of public transport takes the approach that ravel time is lost time and values time as the ratio of the marginal utilities of time and money. As such, travel time is considered as a disutility or cost, but a view is emerging that some people actually enjoy travel time in the act of travel itself, and that travel time can be experienced intrinsically as meaningful and pleasurable. Although time can be spent on different activities (e.g., work, leisure, travel), people only have a limited amount of time to spent, (i.e., twenty-four hours per day), and they will allocate time and money budgets dependent on context and motivation. Following the pioneering work of Becker on the allocation of time, it can be postulated that an hour spent on a meaningful activity is more valuable than an hour spent on a less valuable activity. As such, the value of travel time is not only related to hours and money spent but also to the value of time as experienced by the passenger. In this article we present what the impact is when we look at the psychologically experienced time, using two case studies which show the impact on the service quality of a railway operator.