Freight Transport and the Value of Travel Time Savings: a Meta-Analysis of Empirical Studies

The value of travel time savings (VTTS) has been investigated by transport economists since the mid-1960s. Although the first two decades of research were mainly devoted to VTTS in passenger transport, since the mid-1980s several studies have analysed the VTTS in freight transport from both a theoretical and an empirical viewpoint. The first part of the paper is devoted to a review of the proposed theoretical models for the value of freight travel time savings (VFTTS), and it discusses the issues arising from the use of different methods to collect empirical VFTTS estimates. The second part is based on a meta-analysis of a sample of empirical VFTTS observations related to several European and North American countries. It is shown that both the per-capita gross domestic product and the transport mode are statistically significant variables that can partially explain the variability in VFTTS estimates