Subjectively experienced wellbeing has recently attracted increased attention in transport and mobility studies. However, these studies are still in their infancy and many of the multifarious links between travel behaviour and wellbeing are still under-examined; most studies only focus on one aspect of this link (i.e., travel satisfaction). In this paper we give an overview of studies concerning travel and wellbeing, focusing on results, methods and gaps in present research. We suggest that travel behaviour affects wellbeing through experiences during (destination-oriented) travel, activity participation enabled by travel, activities during (destination-oriented) travel, trips where travel is the activity, and through potential travel (or motility). The majority of empirical studies to date have been based on hedonic views of wellbeing, where pleasure and satisfaction are seen as the ultimate goal in life. They have paid little attention to eudaimonic views of wellbeing, which emphasise the realization of one's true potential, although this form of wellbeing can also be influenced by travel behaviour. We also argue that longer-term decisions, such as residential location choices, can affect wellbeing through travel. Travel options differ between different kinds of neighbourhoods, which can result in different levels of (feelings of) freedom and consequently different levels of subjective wellbeing. Since studies at present only show a subset of the travel behaviour-wellbeing interactions, we conclude the paper with an agenda for future research.

Over the past decades research on travel mode choice has evolved from work that is informed by utility theory, examining the effects of objective determinants, to studies incorporating more subjective variables such as habits and attitudes. Recently, the way people perceive their travel has been analyzed with transportation-oriented scales of subjective well-being, namely the Satisfaction with Travel Scale. However, studies analyzing the link between travel mode choice (i.e., decision utility) and travel satisfaction (i.e., experienced utility) are limited. In this paper we will focus on the relation between mode choice and travel satisfaction for leisure trips (with travel-related attitudes and the built environment as explanatory variables) of respondents in urban and suburban neighborhoods in the city of Ghent, Belgium. The built environment and travel-related attitudes (important explanatory variables of travel mode choice) and mode choice itself affect travel satisfaction. Public transit users perceive their travel most negatively, while active travel results in the highest levels of travel satisfaction. Surprisingly, suburban dwellers perceive their travel more positively than urban dwellers, for all travel modes.

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Studies that model the effects of land use on commuting generally use a trip-based approach or a more aggregated individual-based approach: i.e. commuting is conceptualized in terms of modal choice, distance and time per single trip, or in terms of daily commuting distance or time. However, people try to schedule activities in a daily pattern and, thus, consider tours instead of trips. Data from the 2000 to 2001 Travel Behaviour Survey in Ghent (Belgium) illustrate that car use and commuting times significantly differ between commuting trips within work-only tours and more complex tours. Therefore, this paper considers trip-related decisions simultaneously with tour-related decisions. A multiple group structural equation model (SEM) confirmed that the relationship between land use and commuting differs between work-only tours and more complex tours. Trips should be considered within tours in order to correctly understand the effect of land use scenarios such as densifying on commuting. Moreover, the use of multiple group SEM enabled us to address the issue of the complex nature of commuting. Due to interactions between various explanatory variables, land use patterns do not always have the presumed effect on commuting. Land use policy can successfully influence commuting, but only if it simultaneously accounts for the effects on car availability, car use, commuting distance and commuting time

Recent empirical studies have shown that attitudes and lifestyles are important determinants of travel behavior and modal choice. Less obvious and documented is that these 'soft variables' also influence other, non-travel related aspects such as residential choice. The result is that preferred residential neighborhoods not always match with the actual residential neighborhood. This residential dissonance (or mismatch) also has its influence on travel behavior since the preferred travel modes of dissonant residents may not be ideally available in their actual neighborhood. The main aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of residential dissonance on travel mode choice in Flanders, Belgium. Residential dissonance clearly affects the ability of people in realizing their preferred travel behavior, albeit in different ways for urban and rural residents.

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