How derived is the demand for travel? Some conceptual and measurement considerations

You don't have to be a Star Trek fan to be borderline obsessed with the idea of teleportation. You just have to want to be somewhere you're not, instantly (and preferably with all your DNA molecules and vital organs intact). As a culture, we're so excited by the prospect of teleportation that we latch onto every bite of news that seems to be telling us there's a chance.

There isn't a chance. (Sorry.) But that's besides the point for the "teleportation test" co-developed by Georgia Tech transportation scholar Patricia Mokhtarian more than a decade ago. In 2001, Mokhtarian and collaborator Ilan Salomon conceived the test as a "whimsical but potentially useful" tool to understanding personal travel preferences:

[I]f you could snap your fingers or blink your eyes and instantaneously teleport yourself to the desired destination, would you do so?

The teleportation test breaks down like this: If you answer "yes," you see traveling as a way to reach your destination—a mean to an end. If you answer "no," you may well like the act of traveling itself: the smell of the road, the scenery of the train, the … wheels on the bus. And if you answer "maybe," you might not love the trip but still enjoy some of the tasks you can get done during it.

"It's a stereotype that everyone's commute is horrible."

How derived is the demand for travel? Some conceptual and measurement considerations

Patricia L. Mokhtarian1, Ilan Salomon2

Abstract: This paper contests the conventional wisdom that travel is a derived demand, at least as an absolute. Rather, we suggest that under some circumstances, travel is desired for its own sake. We discuss the phenomenon of undirected travel - cases in which travel is not a byproduct of the activity but itself constitutes the activity. the same reasons why people enjoy undirected travel (a sense of speed, motion, control, enjoyment of beauty) may motivate them to undertake excess travel even in the context of mandatory or maintenance trips. One characteristic of undirected travel is that the destination is anciliary to the travel rather than the coverse which is usually assumed. We argue that the destination may be to some degree ancillary more often than is realized. Measuring a positive affinity for travel is complex: in self-reports of attitudes toward travel, respondents are likely to confound their utility for the activities conducted at the destination, and for activities conducted while traveling, with their utility for traveling itself. Despite this measurement challange, prelimnary empirical results from a study of more than 1900 residents of the San Fransisco Bay Area provide suggestive evidence for a positive utility for travel, and for a derired travel time budget (TTB). The issues raised here have clear policy implications: the way people wil react to policies intended to reduce travel will depend in part on the relative weights they assign to the three components of a utility for travel. Improving our forecasts of travel behavior may require viewing travel literally as "god" as well as "bad" (disutility).

Keywords: Travel attitudes; Travel time budget; Travel behavior; Excess travel

Received 24 June 1999; received in revised form 20 January 2000; accepted 20 January 2000

  • 1. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, USA
  • 2. Department of Geography, Hebrew University, Jerusalem 91905, Israel