Wait time, travel time and waiting during travel: existing research and future directions

Wait time, travel time and waiting during travel: existing research and future directions Wait time, travel time, and waiting during travel are closely related time uses that often overlap in how they are perceived, viewed, and/or valued.Studying these time uses is critical within a transport context because they can define or influence the experience of the overall trip.In this editorial, we synthesise major themes, and identify avenues for future research, a key one being the bi-directional relationship between travel and the duration and experience of the activity at the destination. Parallels between the utilities of wait time, travel time, and waiting during travelWaiting is an inevitable part of life.We often wait, for instance, for someone to arrive, for a favourite TV show to start or at the doctor's office.We wait for a certain activity to happen.Hence, waiting is a derived demand.Waiting time is frequently perceived as wasted time but can also be viewed by some as a welcome window of time that serves as a buffer between activities.Research shows that how long we are willing to wait depends on the activity (or person) for which (or whom) we are waiting for.Web users' tolerable waiting time for information retrieval, for instance, is approximately 2 seconds (Nah, 2004), while the acceptable waiting time for a doctor's appointment is around 23 minutes (Pruyn & Smidts, 1998).Similar to wait time, travel time is also a derived demand (most, though not all, of the time), i.e., the time we need to reach out-of-home activities; and as such, is seen as time to minimise.However, studies asking for people's ideal commute time do not find an ideal commute of 0 minutes, but mostly between 10 and 25 minutes (e.g., Redmond & Mokhtarian, 2001;Ye et al., 2020).This indicates that travel time has a certain positive utility.People might enjoy certain aspects of travel (e.g., sensation of speed, exposure to the environment) or can use travel time to escape from obligations, to adjust and alter between places (e.g., as a transition between work and home), or use it to perform certain productive, social or entertaining activities (Jain & Lyons, 2008;Mokhtarian & Salomon, 2001).However, this positive utility of travel disappears when travel durations exceed maximum acceptable or tolerable travel times, which were found to be around 30 to 45 minutes for commuting (Ermagun et al., 2022;Humagain & Singleton, 2021;Milakis et al., 2015).Waiting during travele.g., waiting for a bus or train to arrive, waiting in a traffic jam, or waiting for a traffic/pedestrian crossing lightis closely related to the prior time uses, i.e., wait time and travel time, but has unique attributes that make it worthy of being studied in its own right.In parallel to the previously discussed findings, waiting during travel can have both positive and negative utility.Studies show that there is a cost threshold above which people do not necessarily want to minimise waiting during travel.Hess et al. (2004) found that most people would prefer to wait five minutes for a free bus than pay $0.75 to travel right away, while studies focusing on High Occupancy/Toll (HOT) lanes indicate that most drivers are not willing to pay for a congestion-free lane (Brownstone et al., 2003).