How are people satisfied with their daily travel? the role of reference points in different contexts

Travel satisfaction has emerged as a hot topic in transportation and travel behavior research over the past few years. As the transport domain specific subjective wellbeing, travel satisfaction is people’s affective and cognitive assessment about their daily travel. Studies have investigated a wide range of factors that may influence travel satisfaction including transport, the built environment, and people’s socioeconomic factors. Research efforts to conceptualize travel satisfaction are relatively scarce. One important issue is what reference points (i.e., the points which people compare their own travel behaviors to) people use to evaluate travel satisfaction. This research project addresses this research gap by investigating how different reference points, including travel preference/attitude, alternative travel choices, past travel behavior, and peers' travel behavior, influence people's assessment about their travel experiences. We are particularly interested in the direct, indirect, mediating, and moderating effects of different reference points on travel satisfaction and how these effects are manifested in different societal and transport system contexts. We propose to conduct the empirical study in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, two neighboring cities but different in the built environment, transport system, and mobility culture, among others. The research is expected to make important theoretical and empirical contributions to the travel satisfaction literature. The research findings would be useful for policy makers to evaluate transport development and policies in terms of their impacts on people’s subjective wellbeing and to develop transport policies that may enhance citizen’s quality of life.