Mobil.TUM16 presentation award for our sequel paper on acceptable travel time


Transformation of urban mobility was the key theme of this year’s mobil.TUM conference (Munich, June 6-7, 2016). Development of new mobility services, organization of multimodal and shared mobility, automated vehicles, assessment of transport systems, implications for travel behaviour as well as governance and participation were among the areas that many interesting oral presentations and posters focused on.

I had the pleasure to present a sequel paper on the concept of acceptable travel time co-authored by Professor Bert van Wee and me (Exploring the acceptable travel time concept in the US and European contexts. Results from Berkeley, CA and Delft, The Netherlands). This presentation followed our 2015 published work (Milakis et al., 2015), where we explored the validity of the acceptable travel time concept as a possible factor in the travel and destination decision-making process based on results from interviews with 20 subjects in Berkeley, CA. In the sequel paper, we replicated our US study in Europe (Delft, The Netherlands) to (a) further explore the acceptable travel time concept in European context and (b) compare results between Delft and Berkeley to gain more insights into this theoretical concept. Results of this new study confirmed the validity of the acceptable travel time concept. Additional evidence showed that acceptable travel time could vary with travel mode. Subjects in Delft had on average a lower acceptable commute time than subjects in Berkeley. Urban, transport as well as sociocultural factors might explain this variation in acceptable travel times.

The presentation attracted some very interesting discussions centered around the variation of acceptable travel time with travel mode, the definition of the concept in utilitarian terms and the static vs dynamic nature of acceptable travel time.

I am glad that the presentation of our sequel study on acceptable travel time won the mobil.TUM 2016 presentation award (sponsored by the Intelligent Transport Society Bavaria e.V.)! The scientific committee assessed the presentation as clear, interesting and stimulating, supported by a high quality paper. 

You may access my presentation at mobil.TUM 2016 from here.
The conference proceedings are available here

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