Valuing long haul and metropolitan freight travel time and reliability.

Most evaluations and economic assessments oftransport proposals and policies in Australia omita valuation of the time spent in transit for individualitems or loads of freight. Knowing aboutdelays, and indeed the practical value of reliability,is useful to shippers and receivers, but this informationdoes not necessarily appear directly in vehicleoperating costs and person travel times. As aresult, benefits generated by improvements fromroad investment and traffic management may beunderstated, and expenditure decisions may bebiased towards passenger movements. The presentpaper applies contextual stated preference (CSP)methods and the associated multinomial logit modelsto estimate the value of such factors from anAustralian survey of freight shippers using roadfreight transport in 1998. The estimated value of$1.40 per hour per pallet for metropolitan multidropfreight services, potentially a substantial valuenot currently tracked consistently or utilized intransport evaluation procedures in Australia, illustratesthe significance of these results