A Model of Travel Happiness and Mode Switching

Abstract In previous research (Abou-Zeid et al., 2008), we postulated that people report different levels of travel happiness under routine and nonroutine conditions and supported this hypothesis through an experiment requiring habitual car drivers to switch temporarily to public transportation. This chapter develops a general modeling framework that extends random utility models by using happiness measures as indicators of utility in addition to the standard choice indicators, and applies the framework to modeling happiness and travel mode switching using the data collected in the experiment. The model consists of structural equations for pretreatment (remembered) and posttreatment (decision) utilities and explicitly represents their correlations, and measurement equations expressing the choice and the pretreatment and posttreatment happiness measures as a function of the corresponding utilities. The results of the empirical model are preliminary but support the premise that the extended modeling framework, which includes happiness, will potentially enhance behavioral models based on random utility theory by making them more efficient.

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