Travel Satisfaction and Well-Being

Abstract

One approach to assessing the quality of life associated with a person’s daily travel is to obtain a summary judgment of that individual’s satisfaction with travel. Such a judgment could be considered a measure of the transportation-domain- specific subjective well-being (SWB). A number of such summary measures have been developed, including happiness, liking, pleasantness, a subjective valuation of the time spent traveling, and two different Satisfaction with Travel Scales (STS). In this chapter, we discuss some of the conceptual differences among these various measures, and review some key empirical results associated with them. In particular, we conceive of travel satisfaction as being directly influenced by five components of travel, as well as by socio-economic/demographic (SED) traits, attitudes, and trip-/ travel-related characteristics. The chapter includes an analysis of data drawn from the well-being module of the 2013 American Time Use Survey (ATUS), to offer preliminary insights into how people feel about their travel episodes, differences in travel-related emotions across socio-economic groups, and how travel compares with other activities in terms of engendering feelings of well-being. We follow with a discussion of the relationship of travel satisfaction to overall well-being, and conclude with some brief reflections on the role of this research domain in our rapidly changing transportation milieu.