Measuring the Value of Time in Freight Transportation

This paper presents an alternative approach to measuring the values of transport time for freight transportation, and examines its applicability through empirical analysis. We develop a model of the freight transportation market, in which carriers incur the cost associated with the effort to reduce transport time, and transport time is endogenously determined in the market. We estimate the freight charge function, expressway choice model, and transport time function, using microdata of freight flow in Japan collected by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism. Based on the estimated freight charge function, we obtain the values of transport time for shippers as an implicit price in the hedonic theory. The estimated values of transport time for shippers are larger than those obtained by the widely adopted method based on the discrete choice model. We also develop a method to evaluate the benefit of time-saving technological change (including infrastructure improvement) based on the hedonic approach. Application to the evaluation of expressway construction suggests that the benefits calculated by our method tend to be larger than those based on the other methods.