Joy of travel

Patricia Mokhtarian and colleagues at UC Davis challenge the established notion of travel as purely derived demand. You only travel because you need to get to work, or get to shopping, or get to a ballgame. Demand for travel is derived from these activities, and constitutes the minimum needed to conduct them. Travel has no inherent attraction. Wrong say the Mokhtarians. There is a joy of travel. Travel exists well beyond that explicable by the derived demand thesis they say in a paper “Understanding the Demand for Travel” following surveys in different communities in the Bay area and in Austin TX. People don’t work to minimize their travel because they consider some travel pleasurable in its own right. Curiosity, variety seeking, the sense of escape and exploration, all these drive some of the demand for travel. Moreover trips cannot be neatly divided into trips of need and those of choice. There is no clear line between functional travel and leisure travel, they say, for many trips contain elements of both. Their surveys found that routine commute trips are often varied just for the heck of it – to see something new, to check out something etc. Mokhtarian guesses the discretionary element of travel at averaging about 5 percent. (see ITS Review UC 2003-06) TRnews 2003-06-02