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Cost-benefit analysis and the evaluation of non-working travel Time savings: some question marks*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 August 2016

François-Xavier de Donnea*
Affiliation:
Université Catholique de Louvain and Faculté Universitaire Catholique de Mons (FUCAM)
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Extract

Since Beesley’s pioneering article of 1965 on the value of time spent travelling, an impressive amount of empirical research has been devoted on both sides of the Atlantic to the measurement of the value people attach to non-working travel-time savings. The rationale for investing time, effort, and money in this research is that a more precise knowledge of people’s perception of travel-time savings may improve the evaluation of transportation projets in two ways. First, a major goal of most transportation projects is travel-time savings. It would be nice to be able to put a money value on those time savings in order to compare the benefits and the costs of the project. Secondly, in most existing empirical studies on the value of time, an important joint product of the study is quantitative information on the time-elasticity of the demand for transportation and knowledge of the sensitivity of route or modal choices to changes in the relative travel time. Knowledge of these elasticities and sensitivities is necessary to forecast the traffic generated by the project over time and, hence, also to evaluate the benefits of the project.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de recherches économiques et sociales 1972 

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Footnotes

*

A first draft of this paper was presented at the Workshop on the Value of Travel Time at the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Highway Research Board, Washington D.C., January 1973. We thank Maurice Marchand for his comments on that first draft.

References

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