What makes travel pleasant and/or tiring? An investigation based on the French National Travel Survey

Abstract

The 2007-08 French National Travel Survey (FNTS) included questions about the trip experience for a random subsample of the respondents' daily travel, offering a rare opportunity to examine a national profile of attitudes toward travel. This study analyzes the self-reported (mental and/or physical) fatigue associated with the selected trip, and its (un)pleasantness. Only 8% of trips were tiring, and fewer than 4% were unpleasant, indicating that travel is by no means universally distasteful. We present a bivariate probit model of the mental and physical fatigue associated with the trip, and binary logit models of whether the trip was pleasant (yes/no) or unpleasant (yes/no). For the most part, socioeconomic variables and indicators of trip length, distance, purpose, and mode have logical relationships to fatigue and pleasantness. However, 11 variables out of 31 common to both sets of models have impacts on fatigue that are opposite to those on un/pleasantness, pointing to conditions under which a trip can be fatiguing but pleasant, or conversely. Accordingly, a key contribution of the research is to demonstrate the value of jointly considering both constructs in order to more comprehensively capture the overall attitudes toward the travelling activity. It is also of interest that activities conducted during the trip appear in both sets of models. In particular, the results suggest that although listening to the radio/music decreases the tendency to rate the trip as mentally fatiguing, it tends to be seen as ameliorating the disutility of a tedious trip more than increasing the pleasantness of the trip. Among the policy-relevant findings, we note the especially negative attitudes towards multimodal trips and trips mainly involving driving cars.

The valuation and demand impacts of the worthwhile use of travel time with specific reference to the digital revolution and endogeneity

“…The largest category of evidence covers the activities individuals engage in while travelling and whether they consider their travel time to be useful, pleasant or wasted (Berliner Kenyon and Lyons 2007;Lyons et al 2007Lyons et al , 2013Lyons et al , 2016Russell et al 2011;Tang et al 2018;Van de Waerden et al 2009;Yosritzal et al 2017). There have also been many studies that investigate how worthwhile activities while travelling affect attitudes and journey satisfaction (Ettema et al 2012;Frei et al 2015;Mokhtarian et al 2015;Rasouli and Timmermans 2014;van Hagen et al 2017) and others that explore mode choice effects (Van der Waerden et al 2010;Etezady et al 2019;Malokin et al 2017Malokin et al , 2019. Whilst such studies tend to recognise that multitasking would be expected to reduce the VTTS, they do not seek to estimate how the worthwhile use of travel time impacts on VTTS.…”

How does travel satisfaction sum up? An exploratory analysis in decomposing the door-to-door experience for multimodal trips

“…Travel time perception varies as a result of the activities carried out while traveling or waiting. Mokhtarian et al (2015) found that listening to music/radio diminishes mental fatigue and increases trip pleasantness. In addition, they indicated that talking to others increases the probabilities of perceiving a trip as pleasant.…”

Changing times – A decade of empirical insight into the experience of rail passengers in Great Britain

“…This was the case more so in relation to active time uses as opposed to passive time uses (such as listening to music). For the latter, the authors suggest that use of mobile technologies is to alleviate boredom or privatise the public space (see also Mokhtarian et al (2015) regarding ameliorating a negative journey experience through listening to radio/music). Schwieterman et al (2013) highlight substantial increases in mobile technology use on passenger transport in the US: up 25% for commuter trains and 18% in intercity trains over the period 2012.…”