Smith’s work verifies that having a comfortable level of control over our lives increases our wellbeing, and it also supports adding bicycle storage rooms to office buildings. Smith found that “Active travelers are happiest with their commute trips…For car and transit commuters, traffic congestion significantly decreases commute wellbeing, and using the trip productively increases commute wellbeing…Data were collected from a web-based survey of workers…in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A. with four modal groups: walk, bicycle, transit and car users…along with travel mode, traffic congestion, travel time, income, general health, attitudes about travel, job satisfaction and residential satisfaction also play important individual roles in shaping commute wellbeing…people who bike and walk to work are happier with their commutes and are relatively unaffected by traffic congestion compared to bus and car commuters.”
Oliver Smith. 2017. “Commute Well-Being Differences by Mode: Evidence from Portland, Oregon, USA. Journal of Transport & Health, vol. 4, pp. 246-254.
Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.