Title

Pricing the travel time of busy women

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

2008

Subject Area

Population - Gender, Transport services - Cost

Abstract

Women are the focus of this paper. In recent decades women have accounted for much of the growth in hours travelled, in public transport patronage and in vehicle kilometres travelled (Ironmonger and Norman, 2007). For the purpose of this paper, busy women are considered to be highly-skilled professionals in paid work who also care for dependents (double shift). They tend to exhibit many of the behavioural patterns of workaholics. This paper sets out a model developed by Cavagnoli (2008) to help transport professionals move away from stated preference surveys of the value of time based on tiny sample sizes, towards revealed preferences of hundreds of millions of trips captured by large scale statistical tools, including the emerging time use database for Melbourne produced by Ironmongere (2006; 2008). The Cavagnoli model explains the supply of female labour as an augmentation of the standard neo-classical economic model. It is an alternative to the approach (Becker, 1965) of the Chicago-based Nobel Prize Economist, Gary S. Becker. This paper is divided into the following sections: Section 2 presents data that show how Australians spend their time; section 3 discusses travel time trends, section 4 presents travel time outside working hours, section 5 reveals preferences of time use of highly skilled women, section 6 sets out a model of utility maximisation for women, section 7 tests our hypotheses against stylised facts; section 8 discusses the implication for building upon previous findings by Morris (1996); section 9 proposes a measure for valuing travel time for economic appraisal of transport projects, and section 10 is the conclusion.