what is value of time?
Answers
There is a saying “Time and tide waits for none”. The saying is indeed true. Time waits for none. It comes and goes. Time is absolutely unbound able. Neither money nor position can buy it. Nothing on earth can subdue or conquer it.
The most remarkable feature of time is its preciousness. Its value is unfathomable and its power is inestimable. Its potential is something which we cannot calculate. A minute is enough to win a victory. A second is enough to make you the richest man in the world. A fraction of a second can make a difference between life and death.
Every moment brings with it thousands of golden opportunities. Every minute is a store-house of ‘chances’. Therefore, we must not allow such precious time to slip away. If we do so, we allow those golden opportunities and chances to slip away too.
As we go through life, we realise for ourselves that, if there is anything in the world which will never come back,
it is time. Once time crosses into the threshold of the past, it never again returns to the ‘present’. Those who have realised this basic truth of life, never allow time to pass away unused. To utilise time fruitfully, we must take concrete steps as to how we are going to use it and what we are going to do with it.
In transport economics,[citation needed] the value of time is the opportunity cost of the time that a traveller spends on his/her journey. In essence, this makes it the amount that a traveller would be willing to pay in order to save time, or the amount they would accept ascompensation for lost time.
One of the main justifications[citation needed] for transport improvements is the amount of time that travellers will save. Using a set of values of time, the economic benefits of a transport project can be quantified in order to compare them to the costs (thus forming the basis ofcost-benefit analysis). In particular, savings (or, for that matter, increases) in travel time form part of the change in consumer surplus for a transport project.
Values of time are used to calculate the non-monetary costs incurred as part of a journey, so that the generalised cost of the journey (a combination of both monetary and non-monetary costs) can be calculated.
The value of time varies considerably from person to person and depends upon the purpose of the journey, but can generally be divided into two sets of valuations: working time andnon-working time. This division is appropriate because the value of working time (i.e. time spent travelling in the course of work) is calculated differently from the value of non-working time (i.e. time spent travelling outside work).
For example, if a worker on a salary of £20 per hour travels to a meeting, the value of time in that case is £20 per hour, because that is the amount the employer would be willing to pay to reduce travel time (as travel time can be considered to be "wasted", i.e. not spent working).