Travel Time Utilization in Multitasking Contexts
Summary
Travel time is increasingly recognised as an opportunity for both productive and leisure activities. Advances in mobile information and communication technologies, vehicle automation and enhancements in public transport environments have shifted perceptions of in-travel time from a disutility to a potentially valuable resource. Travellers now routinely engage in multitasking activities—such as work, social interaction, media consumption and planning—that can reduce the subjective cost of journeys and influence mode choice, scheduling and overall well-being. Research has explored how demographic factors, travel modes and onboard facilities shape activity selection and duration, and how these behaviours feed back into measures such as the value of travel time savings, departure-time decisions and transport demand. Improved modelling frameworks have been developed to jointly capture activity type, duration and productivity, revealing complementarity and substitution effects between concurrent tasks. Understanding travel time utilisation in multitasking contexts has profound implications for transport appraisal, service design and policies aimed at enhancing user experience and promoting sustainable mobility.
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Travel Time Utilization in Multitasking Contexts publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in travel time utilization in multitasking contexts across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Multitasking activities (MTA): Engaging in non-travel tasks such as work, leisure or social interaction during journey segments.
Value of travel time savings (VTTS): The monetary equivalent travellers assign to reductions in journey duration.
Revealed preference: An empirical method that infers traveller valuations and choices from observed behaviour rather than hypothetical scenarios.
Multiple discrete-continuous extreme value (MDCEV) model: A modelling approach that jointly represents the choice and duration of multiple activities during travel.
Extended multiple discrete-continuous (eMDC) model: An advancement of MDCEV that accommodates simultaneous activities without fixed time budgets, enabling analysis of task complementarity and substitution.
Subjective well-being (SWB): Self-reported measure of traveller satisfaction, mood or overall quality of experience associated with travel.
References
- Decomposing mode-specific values of travel time savings with respect to different levels of travel-based multitasking: A revealed preference study. Travel Behaviour and Society (2024).
- Influence of Activity-Travel Participation, Travel Mode Choice, and Multitasking Activities on Subjective Well-Being Using R. Sustainability (2023).
- Fully automated vehicles: The use of travel time and its association with intention to use. Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers - Transport (2019).
- A framework for joint modelling of activity choice, duration, and productivity while travelling. Transportation Research Part B Methodological (2017).
- Departure Time Choice and Bottleneck Congestion with Automated Vehicles: Role of On-board Activities. European Journal of Transport and Infrastructure Research (2020).
- The role of time budgets in models of multi-tasking while travelling: A comparison between the MDCEV and eMDC approach. Transportation Research Part A Policy and Practice (2023).
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