ABSTRACT
The concept of user benefit introduced in Chapter 2 is founded on a change in the generalised cost of travel. Of the two components of generalised cost, money benefits present few difficulties apart from the need for resource cost adjustment discussed in section 3.1. The other component, time, is less straightforward. Few would doubt that reductions in travel time are in general a benefit. But it is not always easy to see exactly how this might be true, particularly where constraints are present and when very small changes are involved, which may seem to have little or no value. More generally, it is not intuitively obvious, even for a given individual, that time savings always have value or the same value, as the measure of benefit described above implies. To discuss this we must consider more carefully than we have done the nature of user benefits, initially to the individual and then to commercial users.
