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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This is an empirical paper that measures and interprets changes in intercity relations at the global scale in the period [2000][2001][2002][2003][2004][2005][2006][2007][2008]. We draw on the network model devised by the Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) research group to measure global connectivities for 307 cities across the world in 2000 and 2008. The measurements for both years are adjusted so that a coherent set of services/cities is used. A range of statistical techniques is used to explore these changes at the city level and the regional scale. The most notable changes are (i) the general rise of connectivity in the world city network, (ii) the loss of global connectivity of US and Sub-Saharan African cities (Los Angeles, San Francisco and Miami in particular), and (iii) the gain in global connectivity of South Asian, Chinese and Eastern European cities (Shanghai, Beijing and Moscow in particular).

Information on air passenger flows is potentially a prime data source for assessing spatial patterns in the world city network, but previous analyses of this issue have been hampered by inadequate and/or partial data. The ensuing analytical deficiencies have reduced the overall value of these analyses. Therefore, this paper examines how some of these deficiencies might be rectified. First, it reviews the rationale for using airline data to analyse the world city network. Secondly, it assesses the problems encountered by previous research. The third section elaborates on the construction of a global intercity matrix based on the so-called Marketing Information Data Transfer database and explains how this matrix can circumvent some previously identified problems.