No wonder you get into so much bother if that's the level of detail you go into for every travel decision.
You can make a living doing this sort of appraisal (at least on populations of travellers rather than individuals). It is my day job!
It is also follows much the same principles as the Department for Transport's mandated methodology for evaluating public expenditure on transport projects (often referred to as WebTAG):
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/transport-analysis-guidance-tag
Introduction
This content contains guidance on the conduct of transport studies. The guidance includes or provides links to advice on how to:
- set objectives and identify problems
- develop potential solutions
- create a transport model for the appraisal of the alternative solutions
- how to conduct an appraisal that meets the requirements of the Department for Transport (DfT)
It certainly seems reasonable that if you can identify your individual 'weightings' and use these as parameters for a personal journey planner that could potentially give your 'ideal' route for each journey. I suspect that understanding the range of each parameter and how you fit in to each is easier said than done and would require quite a bit of trial and error on the part of the user to 'tune' - as others have commented many of these 'weightings' are held and applied without our ever thinking about them, let alone enumerating them!
On a population level, you can (and the DfT, TfL and many private Transport Planning consultancies have) do the research necessary to identify the average values across the population - sufficient for the evaluation of the types of projects the WebTAG methodology and implementations of it by other public bodies would need to consider. As many of the commenters note, average values mask huge variation between individuals. For example, some people hate crowded trains, others hardly notice and pack themselves in to be the first off near the exit. Some people pay for an expensive direct flight, others take three legs and half a day more to save £100 on the air fare. I posted some similar questions that anyone reading this thread could ask themselves to another thread (
https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/1992-stock-refurbishment.216243/page-22) that help to illustrate how people 'value' their time, even very small amounts of time, but also how their 'weightings' differ:
Have you ever pressed the door close button in a lift? Have you ever pressed the button at a Pelican Crossing even though the wait indication is already illuminated (perhaps several times)? Do you drive at 75 mph on motorways even though this is above the speed limit? Do you run or walk faster to catch an Underground train? Do you walk or even run up escalators? Have you ever 'tutted' when a train you are on slows for a signal stop or speed restriction? Do you overtake a car travelling 50 mph so you can go 60 mph on a single carriageway cross country road?
You can of course have different values in different contexts. You might rather dislike travelling to work in a crowded class 700 and want the journey over quickly, but would wait several hours and go a longer route if you could do so hauled by a class 68 or 91 (effectively a negative 'weighting')...
