ABSTRACT
Transport academics and practitioners regard travel as a means to an end, i.e. accessing a destination activity, and propose that travel time is ‘wasted time’. Certainly those fascinated by public transport timetables or who see the journey as a fun activity in itself would be considered eccentric. Travel information, such as the railway timetable, is constructed as a utilitarian mechanism for managing travel time within the context of accessing scheduled activities distributed across geographic space. ‘Real-time’ electronic travel information, the focus of this chapter, transfers the fun of planning innumerable journeys and impossible connections from printed paper timetables to a computer that selects choices based on minimizing journey times and waiting.
