The demand for travel has conventionally been considered to be derived from the demand for spatially-separated activities. This truism has come under question in recent years, with evidence mounting that to some extent (varying with circumstance) travel is desired for its own sake. This highlights the importance of learning more about how individuals perceive the journey itself, since their positive or negative affect for the journey can influence their later travel choices (regarding frequency, mode, length, and other variables). The 2007-08 French National Travel Survey, FNTS (Enquête Nationale Transports et Déplacements, ENTD), offers a unique opportunity to explore this issue with a large-sample (about 20,000 households), nationally-representative travel diary dataset. Alone among national travel surveys (to our knowledge), the FNTS asked several questions related to the individual’s perception of the trip, for a randomly-selected trip among those reported by that person. The present analysis focuses on two of those variables, mufatigue and musensation.
What makes travel pleasant and/or tiring ? An investigation based on The French national travel survey