Does Car Dependence Make People Unsatisfied With Life? Evidence From a U.S. National Survey

What underlying dynamics promote life satisfaction, and what factors hinder its attainment? Defined as people’s overall evaluation of their lives, life satisfaction has emerged as a key construct in studies on subjective wellbeing (SWB), captivating the attention of researchers across diverse fields. Various factors shape life satisfaction, including inherited traits (e.g., baseline level of happiness), individual characteristics (e.g., age, income, and race), social drivers (e.g., trust of others), geographic contexts, and built environment conditions such as access to green spaces (Dolan et al., 2008, Pfeiffer and Cloutier, 2016). In recent years, transportation scholars have been increasingly interested in how travel behaviors converge with wellbeing. Beyond transportation’s utilitarian function, the way individuals move around to access goods, services, and social networks may have implications for wellbeing, leading to higher or lower levels of life satisfaction.

Central to the discussion about transportation and wellbeing is the prevalence of car use and its implication for people’s quality of life. In the United States (U.S.), cars have become deeply ingrained in people’s culture and lifestyles, leading to high rates of car ownership and extensive reliance on cars for daily travel (Handy, 2020, Litman and Laube, 2002, Moody et al., 2021, Newman and Kenworthy, 1989, Urry, 1999). The majority of Americans use their car due to the benefits car-based travel provides, including access, convenience, reliability, favorable pricing, comfort, and flexibility (Litman and Laube, 2002, Moody et al., 2021). Evidence suggests that some of these benefits are associated with enjoyable travel experiences and positive emotions (Ellaway et al., 2003, Eriksson et al., 2013). However, is it possible to become overly car-dependent? And might high levels of car dependence negatively affect life satisfaction?

Prior studies have largely examined the effect of car use on travel satisfaction and people’s emotions while traveling. Yet, the relationship between car use and life satisfaction received limited attention. This study addresses this gap by exploring how car dependence relates to people’s evaluation of their lives as a whole in a car-dependent society. We use data from an original national survey to understand the travel behaviors of U.S. adults living in urban and suburban areas and how these behaviors affect life satisfaction, if at all.

The paper is structured in six sections. Section 2, devoted to the literature review, examines how existing research defines car dependence and its intersection with life satisfaction. Section 3 describes the data collection and analysis process, including our variables and modeling approach. The results are presented in section 4. In section 5, we discuss our findings and outline possible future research directions. The paper ends with concluding remarks in section 6.

Literature review

The U.S. has one of the highest rates of car ownership and use worldwide. A significant proportion of the American population depends on private vehicles to access goods and services. About 92 % of occupied housing units have access to at least one vehicle and 87 % of Americans use their cars daily (National Household Travel Survey, 2017, U.S. Census Bureau, 2022). In addition, while 69 % of commuters drive to work, only 3 % use public transit to access their jobs (U.S. Census Bureau, 2022).

Data

This study uses data from an original nationwide survey conducted online in November 2022. The survey covered a variety of topics, including interest in car-free living, neighborhood and home choices, transportation choices and preferences, commuting patterns, life satisfaction, and demographic characteristics. In this paper, we only use parts of the survey that are relevant to our research question.

We recruited participants through Dynata Survey Panel, which includes a network of people who

Car dependence trends among U.S. adults

Fig. 1 illustrates the distribution of answers about car dependence among our weighted survey respondents. To describe subjective car dependence trends in our sample, we categorized the car dependence factor variable using percentile-based groups, ranging from under the 10th percentile to more than the 90th percentile. Our results show that nearly half of respondents fall within the middle percentiles (25th to 75th), suggesting a moderate level of car dependence. Respondents reporting higher

Discussion

In today’s society, cars have become the primary mode of transportation for a large share of U.S. Adults. Perceived as convenient, reliable, and comfortable, cars provide mobility benefits allowing their users to access destinations and engage in social, economic, and recreational activities. However, the prevalence of car dependence also has negative implications for wellbeing, sustainability, and social equity. This study joins scholars’ effort to understand how travel behaviors affect

Conclusion

Planning and transportation policies aim to promote wellbeing and people’s quality of life. One policy implication of our study that stems from the negative association between high levels of car dependence and life satisfaction involves promoting multimodality. One of our measures of objective car dependence (i.e., the share of car trips out of out-of-home trips) captures to some extent multimodality. The results indicate that using a car for more than 50 % of the time in a typical week, which

Funding sources

The authors gratefully acknowledge support from the Institute for Social Science Research at Arizona State University and the Center for Teaching Old Models New Tricks (TOMNET), a University Transportation Center sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation through Grant No. 69A3551747116.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Rababe Saadaoui: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Visualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Deborah Salon: Writing – review & editing, Funding acquisition, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Huê-Tâm Jamme: Writing – review & editing, Funding acquisition, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Nicole Corcoran: Writing – review & editing, Formal analysis, Conceptualization. Jordyn Hitzeman: Writing – review &

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.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Dylan Connor for his feedback on early drafts of this paper.