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

该学院早期职业发展(Career)奖支持基础性行为研究，以了解是什么推动了从以可持续交通方式为导向的生活方式向以汽车为导向的生活方式的转变。尽管负担得起、减少拥堵并与低温室气体排放相关的城市交通系统至关重要，但过去十年的发展表明，许多多式联运出行者最终会转向单人汽车出行。理解这些变化的关键可能是过去的旅行经历、旅行满意度和旅行期间的主观幸福感如何影响未来的旅行者决策，但这些影响不能被当前的建模方法充分捕获。本研究开发了一个新的分析框架来模拟和预测这种反馈效应，这将导致对城市出行长期动态的更丰富的理解和出行需求预测工具的改进。因此，研究支持制定政策和基础设施投资决策，旨在提高城市出行的环境和社会可持续性，并提供和维护高质量的公共交通服务。这些努力对于向受关注社区提供可获得和负担得起的交通选择和机会、实现气候目标以及增强该国的经济韧性至关重要。研究活动与教育活动相结合，以提高运输工程学生的关键技能，并在俄亥俄州哥伦布市的小学生中建立早期的兴奋和运输工程意识。在前期研究的基础上，对过去的旅行经历、旅行满意度和旅行期间的主观幸福感(SWB)影响未来旅行行为的几种行为机制进行了假设。使用美国一个主要大都市地区多模式旅行者的详细旅行日记数据和适当的计量经济学模型来研究这些机制。本研究的创新之处在于，首次系统地研究了满意度/主观幸福感、信念和选择之间的动态关系。这项研究的重点是交通工具的使用，但目的是得出与科学界对旅行者选择的理论概念化相一致的关于行为过程的概括性见解。这支持了该领域向新兴的整体模式的转变，该模式在旅行者选择框架的传统新古典经济元素中添加了情感成分。结果将被转化为新的绩效指标，可用于公交机构和大都市规划组织，以量化公交服务质量和乘客行为之间的联系，并更好地量化公共资金对公交的影响。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.