CAREER: How Transportation User Experiences Shape Future Behavior: Learning from the Past

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This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award supports foundational behavioral research to understand what drives shifts from lifestyles oriented toward sustainable transportation modes – transit in particular – to auto-oriented lifestyles. Despite the critical importance of urban transportation systems that are affordable, reduce congestion, and are associated with low greenhouse gas emissions, developments over the last decade suggest that many multi-modal travelers eventually migrate to single-occupancy automobile travel. A key to understanding these shifts may be the way in which past travel experiences, satisfaction with travel, and subjective well-being during travel shape future traveler decision-making, but these effects are not sufficiently captured by current modeling approaches. This research develops a novel analytical framework to model and forecast such feedback effects, which will lead to a richer understanding of the long-term dynamics of urban travel and an improvement of travel demand forecasting tools. Thus, the research supports the development of policies and infrastructure investment decisions that aim to increase the environmental and social sustainability of urban travel and the provision and maintenance of high-quality public transportation services. Such efforts are central to providing accessible and affordable transportation options and access to opportunities to communities of concern, to meeting climate goals, and to enhancing the nation’s economic resilience. The research activities are integrated with educational activities to improve critical skills of transportation engineering students and build early excitement and awareness of transportation engineering among elementary school students in Columbus, Ohio. Comprehensive outreach activities engage transit practitioners early and throughout the project and ensure the relevance and applicability of the research to practice.Based on prior research, several behavioral mechanisms are hypothesized through which past travel experiences, satisfaction with travel, and subjective well-being (SWB) during travel shape future travel behavior. These mechanisms are investigated using detailed travel diary data from multi-modal travelers in a major US metropolitan area and appropriate econometric models. The novelty of this research lies in that, for the first time, the dynamics between satisfaction/SWB, beliefs, and choices are systematically studied. The research focuses on transit use but aims to derive generalizable insights about behavioral processes that tie in with the scientific community’s theoretical conceptualization of traveler choices. This supports the transformation of the field toward an emerging, holistic model that adds affective components to the traditional neoclassical economic elements of the traveler choice framework. The results will be translated into novel performance metrics that can be used by transit agencies and metropolitan planning organizations to quantify the link between transit service quality and passenger behavior and to better quantify the impacts of public funding for transit.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.