Cyclists Have Happiest Commute, Shows US Smartphone App

“Technology allows us to capture people’s emotional experience,” says Yingling Fan, an urban and regional planning professor at the University of Minnesota. She has tracked commuter trips with colleagues on the Daynamica smartphone app created by a company she cofounded.

This app collects GPS data on routes chosen and then asks participants to rank segments by emotions, mapping happiness, meaningfulness, pain, sadness, stress, and tiredness. These emotions are then transferred to the University of Minnesota’s Transportation Happiness Map.

“Our research showed biking is the happiest,” says Fan, who tracked commuters in Minneapolis. She has been studying population-level travel behavior and associated emotional experiences since 2011.

The research discovered that the mapped route with the highest scores for “happiness” was the separated, riverside cycleway beside the West River Parkway.

In a short film introducing the Transportation Happiness Map, Fan said: “Urban planners have a lot of power to shape people’s emotional experience.”

In the same film, Minnesota Department of Transportation transport and public health planner Nissa Tupper said: “When most people think about commuting, they think about being stuck behind a wheel, and that’s an immediate unhappy situation.”

Fan’s research joins similar studies that found those who walk or cycle to work are happier than car commuters.

A Statistics Canada survey found that 66% of people who cycle or walk to work are “very satisfied” with their commutes. However, only 32% of car commuters say the same, and for public transit users, it’s even less, at just 25%. Just 6% of Canadian cyclists say they are “dissatisfied” with their commute. 18% of car commuters report dissatisfaction, and it’s 23% for those who take public transit.

According to Dr. David Lewis, a fellow of the International Stress Management Association, car and train commuters can experience greater stress than fighter pilots going into battle. He compared the heart rate and blood pressure of 125 commuters with those of pilots and riot police in training exercises.

“The difference is that a riot policeman or a combat pilot have things they can do to combat the stress that is being triggered by the event,” said Dr. Lewis.

“But the commuter cannot do anything about it at all—[there’s] a sense of helplessness.”

Dr. Lewis said commuting by car or train makes people feel “frustrated, anxious and despondent.”

According to the Swiss economists Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer those who drive to work need to earn more to pay for their commute, but not just in pure money terms:

“Workers with one-hour car commutes must earn 40% more money to have a sense of well-being equal to that of a person who walks or bikes to work.”