Relationships of life satisfaction with commuting and built environment: A longitudinal analysis

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Abstract

Although detrimental effects of commuting have been widely researched, little longitudinal evidence can be found regarding whether changes in commuting time and modes cause changes in life satisfaction. This study examines the relationships of life satisfaction with commuting from a longitudinal perspective. The effects of built environment are also examined. Using longitudinal survey data from 4505 respondents in China, the findings show that the increase in commuting time associates with losses in life satisfaction. Switching from non-active modes to active modes associates with increases in life satisfaction. Nonetheless, switching from active modes to non-active modes only reduces life satisfaction for people who experienced changes in some specific built environment attributes (e.g., increasing population density). Most changes in built environment associate with life satisfaction changes. The findings suggest that policy and planning efforts to promote active commuting and reduce commuting time (e.g., providing walkable and cyclist-friendly environment and promoting job–housing balance) should continue.

Introduction

Life satisfaction has recently been put on the agenda for governments. For instance, the report of The Fourteenth Five-Year Plan in China indicates unprecedented efforts are expected to improve life satisfaction in the next five years. Aiming to promote life satisfaction, it is of great significance to examine the factors of life satisfaction. In this regard, increasing enthusiasm for this topic can be found in the literature, which suggests that many life domains are contributors to life satisfaction (Cao, 2016, Mao and Wang, 2020, Yin et al., 2020b).

In the literature, key determinants of life satisfaction have been widely studied, varying from individual attributes, travel characteristics to surrounding environment issues (see e.g., Chatterjee et al., 2020, Clark et al., 2020, Lorenz, 2018, Nie and Sousa-Poza, 2018). However, most of the related studies are performed in the context of developed countries (Lorenz, 2018). Given different commuting habits and living conditions in developing countries such as India and China, it is necessary to re-examine the importance of commuting to life satisfaction in such a context. Among developing regions, China is the largest country with rapid urbanization process (Wang et al., 2018, Wang et al., 2021a, Yin et al., 2020a). Owing to motorization, commuting time and distances tend to increase in many Chinese cities, which are negatively associated with travel satisfaction (Ye et al., 2020, Ye and Titheridge, 2019, Zhu and Fan, 2018). On average, commuters have to travel more than 7 km in 31 Chinese cities in 2020 (China Academy of Urban Planning and Design, 2020). Commuting experiences are predicted to deteriorate due to continuous urban sprawl in future. Meanwhile, the urbanization in China also leads to dramatic changes in built environment, which provides a context to study how commuting and built environment influence life satisfaction.

We identify-two main gaps in existing studies that motivate this study. First, existing studies often focus on the association between commuting and life satisfaction based on cross-sectional data. Researchers not only examine the direct associations between commuting and life satisfaction, but also provide evidence on the mediating role of travel satisfaction (De Vos and Witlox, 2017). However, the literature provides little longitudinal evidence for the association between the two factors. The longitudinal relationship is important for establishing targeted policies to mitigate the losses in life satisfaction caused by long commuting (Martin et al., 2014). Several studies find that changes in commuting modes are essential triggers of people’s emotion (Knott et al., 2018). Accordingly, it is reasonable to assume the longitudinal association between commuting and life satisfaction; that is, changes in commuting modes and time may lead to changes in life satisfaction. This longitudinal association remains, to the best of our knowledge, largely unknown in the literature. Second, the literature has examined how built environment affects life satisfaction based on cross-sectional survey data (Cao, 2016, Yin et al., 2019), whereas the potential longitudinal relationship is often neglected. Because of the built environmental impacts on various life domains (Cervero and Murakami, 2010, Moore et al., 2018, Tronchin et al., 2018, Wang et al., 2020), we can foresee that changes in the built environment may associate with life satisfaction changes.

Based on longitudinal survey data from China in the years of 2014 and 2016, the present study could enrich the current knowledge by: (1) examining the longitudinal relationship of commuting characteristics with life satisfaction, and (2) exploring the longitudinal relationship of the built environment with life satisfaction within a unified framework. Our findings provide implications for Chinese stakeholders to improve people’s life satisfaction by promoting transport policies and urban planning strategies.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. A brief review of the research on the influential factors of life satisfaction is presented in Section 2. Section 3 presents the data and methodology. Section 4 describes the estimation results. Section 5 discusses the key results and the limitations. The final section presents our conclusions.

Section snippets

Cross-sectional associations between factors and life satisfaction

(1) Commuting time and life satisfaction.

A growing body of research has examined the association between commuting time and life satisfaction (Nie and Sousa-Poza, 2018, Wang et al., 2021b, Yin et al., 2019). Although several studies find no significant association between them based on cross-sectional analysis (Dickerson et al., 2014, Morris and Zhou, 2018), most studies find that commuting time is negatively associated with life satisfaction (Choi et al., 2013; Hilbrecht et al., 2014, Lorenz,

Data and variables

This analysis obtained data from the Labor-force Dynamics Survey (CLDS). The CLDS was a survey covering 29 provinces in China, which is carried out by Sun Yat-sen University. As a longitudinal survey, the CLDS has built a tracking database recording the survey data every two years since 2012. The survey was carried out between July and September in survey years. To make it representative of the nation labor-force population, a multi-stage cluster and stratified probability proportionate to size

Descriptive statistics

Descriptive statistics of the exogenous and endogenous variables are shown in Table 1. The average life satisfaction of the interviewees at wave one was 3.60 and it increased to 3.74 at wave two. 2483 interviewees used active modes (i.e., walking or cycling) as their main commuting modes at wave one, accounting for 55.12 % of the sample. The rate decreased to 49.66 % at wave two. 217 interviewees experienced changes in employment and 393 interviewees experienced a childbirth in their households

Discussion

This study examines the relationships of commuting characteristics and built environment with life satisfaction from a longitudinal perspective. It extends the literature in the following ways: (1) it investigates whether and how commuting mode shift (i.e., switching from active to non-active and switching from non-active to active) associates with life satisfaction changes; (2) it examines whether change in commuting time associates with life satisfaction changes; (3) it identifies the effects

Concluding remarks

This study examines the relationships of life satisfaction with commuting characteristics and built environment based on longitudinal survey data. It contributes to the literature by providing additional evidence on the relationships from the longitudinal perspective. The findings show that people tend to have losses in life satisfaction when their commuting time increases between two waves. As for commuting modes, switching from non-active commuting to active commuting associates with

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This work was sponsored by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 2021RC273), Project funded by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2022M720992), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 72101017, 52202388, 72204114, 52072025, 42274051), and the Humanities, Social Sciences Fund of Ministry of Education of China (No. 22YJC630191).

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