Abstract:It is drummed into us by every textbook, every class, and countless studies: “travel is a derived demand”, derived from the demand for spatially-separated activities. The activities are the desired end; the travel is seen as purely the means to the end. To be sure, the occasional transportation professional has commented on the intrinsic benefits of travel (see Mokhtarian and Salomon, 2001 and Mokhtarian et al., 2001 for examples), and my own ideas have been greatly influenced by these earlier scholars who “thought outside the box”. Nevertheless, virtually all of our policies, planning, and models are predicated on the assumption that travel is a disutility to be minimized.