MdM Keynote Speaker Series 2024: "Mobility and well-being: Five lessons learned from recent projects", by Veronique Van Acker

We are pleased to announce that Veronique Van Acker, from the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research, will be giving a keynote talk on “Mobility and well-being: Five lessons learned from recent projects”.

MdM Keynote Speaker Series 2024

Title: “Mobility and well-being: Five lessons learned from recent projects”


Speaker:  Veronique Van Acker, Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research

Date: Thursday, 31^st of October 2024
Time: from 10:00 to 11:00 
Venue: Sala Montseny (Room Z/023 - Z/022) ICTA-UAB

Commuting has been found to be one of the least enjoyable activities in life and has also been called “the stress that doesn’t pay”. This was mentioned in studies back in the early 2010s. Several of these early studies also indicated how commuting has a negative impact on  personal well-being. For example, the 2014 UK Annual Population Study shows that commuters are less happy and more anxious than non-commuters.

It is therefore important to understand exactly why people are unhappy with their commute, or with mobility in general. Since the development of the Satisfaction with Travel Scale (STS) by Ettema et al. (2011), this type of research seems to have gained momentum. In this presentation, I will present five lessons learned based on insights from some of my recent projects. This includes:

1. The STS consists of 9 items covering two dimensions, affective and cognitive. But you also gain interesting insights if you focus on only one of these scale items, especially if you do so from a transport management perspective. 
    
2. The STS now seems to dominate research, but other ways of measuring travel satisfaction are still relevant. For example, for public transport studies it is still useful to focus on satisfaction with specific transport service attributes and relate this to concepts like ‘loyalty’.
    
3. Travel time is not always wasted time but can be worthwhile in itself, especially when you ask travelers for which reason they value their trips, what type of activities they do while travelling, and how various experience factors have contributed to this.
    
4. Commuting is only a part of life and interactions with other life domains should be carefully considered, especially how people spend their time.
    
5. Given the increasing participation in virtual activities such as working-from-home, time use data might provide complementary information to travel surveys that we traditionally use.

Veronique Van Acker is a Research Scientist at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER, since 2016) where she is heading the research theme ‘Living with urban dynamics’ of the Urban Development and Mobility department. She is also a Guest Professor at the Department of Geography of Ghent University (since 2017) where she teaches courses on Spatial Analysis. Before joining LISER, she has worked as an Assistant Professor in Urban Studies at the University of Amsterdam (2013-2016) and as a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University (2010-2016). She obtained her PhD in Geography from Ghent University in 2010. Her research interests include the interaction between the built environment and travel behaviour, lifestyles and attitudes in relation to mobility, differences in mobility attitudes and behaviour between generations, and how early experiences affect travel habits.  Her current research focuses on travel satisfaction and subjective well-being. She uses a life-oriented  approach by considering the interactions between satisfaction with multiple life domains and not only travel.

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