Whether or not the value of time guidance succeeds at saving commuters time (it often does not), there are very specific inequities baked in.

It places an explicit bias on saving richer households time, allowing the benefits of time savings to be scaled to household income, putting additional barriers in the way of those in poverty and with lower incomes. It puts more value on a business trip taken at rush hour, which is more likely to be white collar, than off-peak work travel or other trips, like picking up a child from daycare or a doctor’s appointment, claiming that the costs of being late to those destinations are hard to calculate. However, the costs of these delays are very real. Parents may be charged per minute when late to pick up a child from daycare, and doctors’ offices often have policies that charge patients for missed appointments.

Another key measure in this system of performance measurement that transportation agencies use is delay, which is separate from the value of time but closely related.

Under current federal law, all state departments of transportation and metropolitan planning organizations are to set targets for reducing “delay” on roadways—but only for vehicles. “Delay” is the difference between how quickly vehicles move on a corridor in free-flowing traffic conditions (e.g., the middle of the night) versus rush hour. Value of time is how we quantify and measure the economic impact of the time lost to delay.