ABSTRACT

The research has highlighted the centrality of corporeal travel to extended social networks. Networking highlights how travel is a social practice that involves embodied work of scheduling, travelling, visiting, guiding, hosting, and cleaning. While discussion about commuting and global business travel has accepted that the demand for such travel is price inelastic, leisure travel and travel for social networking have been presumed to be price elastic. Moreover, in traditional analysis leisure travel is seen as a minor residual category. The literature reflects a perceived lack of neighbourhood, but also a sense of physical insecurity. Transport planning bases its analysis on individual utility maximizing agents, even if the analysis allows for some impacts of joint decision making within each household. If transport policy were developed to control the environmental externalities of travel and the social externalities, then this research reveals many hurdles to policy implementation that an economic and engineering analysis would not.