Travel Time and Subjective Well-Being

Abstract

This paper explores the relative impacts of commute time on subjective well-being (SWB) with data from a Gallup–Healthways survey. Two different measures of SWB—a comprehensive measure of overall well-being and whether people experienced happiness for most of the day yesterday—are analyzed to address various definitions of SWB. The first measure takes a global view of SWB that encompasses both experienced and remembered utility, and the second measure looks at SWB as experienced utility dealing with feelings of happiness. With ordinary least squares and logit regression models, commute time is found to be statistically significant and negatively related to both the global evaluation of SWB and the experientially focused measure of SWB. Because this study uses 4 years of well-being data from the United States, results provide robust support that commute time does have a significant role in well-being in this country. The analysis also finds a strong correlation between commute time and congestion, which suggests that effective policies to reduce congestion can be one method of improving SWB for large segments of the population.