Reasonable travel time – the traveller’s perspective

This chapter introduces and develops the concept of reasonable travel time. This is defined as “a door-to-door journey time that is acceptable to the individual traveller for reaching a particular destination and its associated activities, given the conditions provided to turn 'lost time' into 'useful time' while travelling”. It makes the case for a new debate that moves beyond the historic emphasis in the transport sector on the desire to minimise travel time by increasing speed (of the journey’s trunk segment). Although the “commodification” of travel time has advantages, it only represents part of a more holistic conceptualisation of travel time that should also include the experience of travel time, door-to-door travel, and the different types of activities undertaken at the destination. In this chapter, each of these concepts is outlined and discussed and High-Speed Rail is used as a focus to explore further the notion of reasonable travel time. It is concluded that a broader perspective is needed to understand a traveller’s decisions about travel and recognise the richness in the concept of time in terms of its quality and how it is used. There needs to be a much greater appreciation of the variability in the travelling public, and that not all people have the same values and objectives when travelling.