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In previous research we investigated the measurement of travel well-being in a way that accounts for the routine nature of travel. We postulated that when people are in a routine, they don’t engage in a cognitive process of evaluating their travel happiness. Only when people evaluate their options and reconsider their decisions will they think of their travel happiness. We tested this hypothesis through an experiment requiring habitual car drivers to switch temporarily to public transportation. After this intervention, participants reported significantly different levels of happiness with their commute by car compared to what they reported when they were in a routine.

 

In this paper we posit and test various behavioral mechanisms that might be driving the change in reported travel happiness in the context of the experiment described above. The change in reported travel happiness could be for instance due to an actual adaptation process that causes people to be on a hedonic treadmill. Alternatively, the change could be attributed to a measurement effect, such as scale norming, demand effects, context effects, or seasonality, or to self-selection. We present a flexible modeling framework that allows testing for changes in adaptation levels and unobserved scale effects and the determination of the relevance of different travel happiness measures in choice behavior.  We propose further research to investigate other posited hypotheses.