Accessibility and satisfaction with daily commute: Does subjective perception in accordance with objective measurement?

Abstract

Although many scholars have revealed daily commuting satisfaction is related to both psychological factors and travel quality and efficiency under objective travel environment, few studies have investigated the relationship between accessibility and satisfaction. To fill this research gap, this paper explores whether accessibility is in accordance with satisfaction with daily commute (SWDC), and the dominant factors influencing SWDC in different time periods. Given the important objective role of accessibility, this paper used 1512 valid questionnaire data and API traffic big data from Xi'an, China, and employed the Satisfaction with Travel Scale (STS) covering three domains, and hierarchical regression methods to calculate the cumulative opportunity accessibility for four transport modes (walking, cycling, car, and public transport [PT]). The results show that the accessibility of the four transport modes was consistent with SWDC within 20-min. There were significant changes in car and PT within 40- and 60-min traffic circles; however, accessibility and SWDC results for these two modes were inconsistent. Furthermore, we found that travel attitude had the greatest impact on SWDC for walking and cycling within 20 min. Analysis of SWDC for car and PT in three time periods (i.e., 20 min, 20–40 min, and 40–60 min) showed that SWDC with car travel was only significantly affected by the built environment within 20–40 min, whereas travel characteristics played a dominant role in the other two time periods. For PT, SWDC was most affected by built environment, travel characteristics, and travel-related attitude.