The valuation of reliability for personal travel

The paper reviews progress made towards a general theory of the traveller's valuation of travel time reliability, and give some indication of recent empirical research in this area. In the progress it brings together a large number of theoretical and empirical results, many of which are only partly in the public domain. Key theoretical results relating to the highway mode are discussed, and expanded to take in the additional complexity of scheduled public transport services. The paper also deals with the problems of collecting empirical data, and describes a recent study carried out by the authors in the context of rail travel, showing how valuations can be derived. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.