Ever wonder if your daily commute is actually wasting your time — or if some trips feel more valuable than others? This team built a smartphone app called Woorti that tracks how people travel across Europe and asks them how they feel about it. Instead of just counting minutes and money, they measured satisfaction, well-being, and personal preferences. The result is a massive European dataset showing what travel time is truly worth to real people across different transport modes.
Cities and transport companies invest billions in infrastructure based on outdated estimates of what people's travel time is worth. Traditional models treat all travel time as a cost to minimize, but in reality people value different trips differently — a scenic bike ride feels nothing like a stressful commute. Without accurate behavioral data, mobility services and infrastructure investments regularly miss what travelers actually want.
The team built the Woorti/Motiv smartphone app for contextual mobility surveys that captures how users feel about their travel across different transport modes. They also produced a European-wide behavioral and mobility dataset from 11 countries, plus a new methodology for estimating Value of Travel Time that accounts for well-being, personal preferences, and motivations — not just economics.
If you are a MaaS platform struggling to understand why users pick one transport mode over another — this project developed the Woorti smartphone app and a European-wide mobility dataset covering 11 countries that reveals how travelers value their time across different modes. You could use these behavioral insights to redesign route suggestions that match what people actually prefer, not just what's fastest on paper.
If you are a transport consultancy advising cities on infrastructure investment and you need better cost-benefit numbers — this project created a new methodology for estimating Value of Travel Time that goes beyond simple economics to include well-being and personal preferences. The European-wide dataset collected from 13 consortium partners across 11 countries gives you real behavioral data to back up your recommendations.
If you are a fleet management company trying to optimize routes for driver satisfaction and retention — this project produced a validated dataset and assessment tools that show how travel experience quality varies by transport mode, trip purpose, and personal motivation. These insights can help you design routes and schedules that reduce driver turnover by accounting for what makes travel time feel worthwhile.
The project was publicly funded as a Research and Innovation Action, and the objective states the European-wide dataset will be made available to the scientific community. Licensing terms for commercial use would need to be negotiated with the coordinator at Zilinska Univerzita v Ziline in Slovakia.
The data collection already operated at European scale — the consortium spanned 13 partners across 11 countries including Belgium, Spain, Finland, France, Italy, Norway, and Portugal. The Woorti app was deployed as a working smartphone application for crowdsourced data gathering, demonstrating cross-border scalability.
IP is likely shared among the 13 consortium partners under the Horizon 2020 grant agreement. The coordinator is Zilinska Univerzita v Ziline (Slovakia). Any licensing for the Woorti app technology or the VTT methodology would need to go through them.
The project closed in July 2020. Based on available project data, the Motiv App was listed as a demo deliverable for smartphone-based data collection. Current availability and maintenance status would need to be confirmed directly with the project team.
Traditional travel time valuation focuses purely on economics — minutes saved equals money saved. MoTiV introduced a methodology that also captures motivations, preferences, well-being, and the quality of the travel experience itself, collected via contextual smartphone surveys rather than after-the-fact questionnaires.
The Value of Travel Time methodology is directly used in cost-benefit analyses for transportation infrastructure projects. Updated VTT estimates based on real behavioral data from 11 European countries could strengthen the evidence base that transport authorities need for investment decisions.
The MoTiV consortium brought together 13 partners from 11 countries, giving it genuine pan-European coverage — important when the goal is understanding travel behavior across different cultures and transport systems. With 3 industry partners and 4 SMEs (23% industry ratio), the project leaned academic but had enough private-sector involvement to keep outputs grounded. The coordinator is Zilinska Univerzita v Ziline in Slovakia, a higher education institution. The geographic spread (Western, Southern, Northern, and Eastern Europe) means the dataset captures diverse mobility patterns, which adds commercial value for anyone building Europe-wide transport services.
Zilinska Univerzita v Ziline (Slovakia) — contact through university channels or project website
Want to explore how MoTiV's travel behavior data could improve your mobility product or transport planning model? SciTransfer can connect you with the research team and help structure a collaboration.
