ABSTRACT
To help make clear the distinctive features of this ‘appraised’ passenger experience, as distinct from the features of a sensory, social and situated passenger experience created through social research, we will highlight the differences in their spatiality – the differences in their contingent possibilities for movement. Both versions of the passenger move from departure to destination, from A to B, along a line – their spatiality is more or less linear. Lines are not all the same, however, as Tim Ingold has recently explored (Ingold 2007). Ingold attends to the differences between a line as a planned series of joined dots from point A to point B, to a free-flowing line or trail that has no beginning or end, that passes through places A and B as it responds to circumstances en route. Within the ‘flattened’ tenets of economic ‘transport appraisal’, individual passengers move from a point of departure to a point of arrival in the shortest possible time, and ideally that would be no time at all. It is a world constituted by clock time and money, creating a line that can be plotted on a graph. The line of the journey is essentially uniform, it has no particular characteristics or quality of experience, and ends when the passenger arrives at the destination. Such a
line moves over a largely unmarked world, racing from location to location in an attempt to achieve pure transportation: the quickest, straightest path (Ingold 2007: ch. 3). The passenger on such a line is static and unengaged with the world until the destination, the point of activity and re-entry back into the economic world. For the economically modelled passenger (travelling in the course of work) nothing happens en route, everything happens before and after. So there appears to be no possibility for valuable activity when travelling – or when waiting in the moments in between. What now follows is an introduction to the design and implementation of the Travel Remedy Kit, which we will argue is a remedy kit for both improving individual embodied travel and, crucially, economically modelled travel in transport appraisal schemes.
