The Banality of Joyfulness (in Transportation)

Transportation Should Be Joyful. Here’s Why & How We Can Make It Happen.

A smiling woman riding a flowered bike in Frankfurt’s Romer. Photo by me.

Joyfulness is one of the last things we might associate with transportation policy. In fact, you could say that transport is a daily, relentless nuisance, the main obstacle to even a gram of joy, and that your daily commute makes Sysiphus’s rock-pushing look like a day at the park. If you identified with that sentiment, this blog is for you.

NUMO believes that joyfulness is a fundamental characteristic of the new normal in mobility. Mobility should also be just and sustainable, but those attributes are more easily definable and quantifiable. So I’ll try to address how we define joy, how we measure it and how that reflects in transportation policy and practice.

What is Joyfulness, and How Do You Measure It?

I’m tempted to get into the weeds of what joyfulness means, but please indulge this briefest of brief attempts.

People cross a small bridge in the city center of the beautiful Thimphu in Bhutan, probably reflecting on their King’s amazing idea to make Gross National Happiness a main goal for their entire country. Photo by me.

A term associated with joyfulness that has been easier to define and measure is happiness. In fact, the King of Bhutan decided that the entire kingdom’s main goal as a country would not be gross domestic product (GDP) but rather gross national happiness (GNH). The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and the United Nations have since developed metrics and indicators to integrate and scale GNH for use in other countries’ policies (Bhutan itself has a wonderful and simple framework for doing so).

Psychology has also helped to define and differentiate happiness and joyfulness, most notably as part of the sub-discipline of positive psychology. In psychology, the difference between joyfulness and happiness is that the latter is momentary and attached to a specific time and place. If we go beyond happiness and transcend the specific space and time happiness is associated with, we shall find joyfulness.

Grasping the definition of joyfulness is more abstract and, likewise, is quite complicated to measure. For the purposes of this blog, let’s say that joyfulness is an experience that transcends happiness and that encompasses a more life-changing experience than the direct experience of happiness.

When it comes to measuring joyfulness in transportation, there are several findings that relate it to specific activities, and transportation doesn’t usually fare well when compared to other activities. For instance, in a large 2004 study assessing the joyfulness of 28 typical activities as surveyed among more than a thousand participants, Daniel Kahneman and others found that commuting to work was the least enjoyable activity. In 2014 the Office of National Statistics (ONS) in the United Kingdom conducted a detailed review of commuting and well-being and found that “the worst effects of commuting on personal well-being were associated with journey times lasting between 61 and 90 minutes.” In a more general study from 2019, ONS found that “those [individuals] of working age are less likely to report high life satisfaction if they have a higher share of spending on transport.”

Though, in a strict sense, traveling is not absolutely essential in our lives (or, at least, a lot of travel is not), I believe that we can achieve joyfulness with the help of transportation. How, you ask? Let me elaborate.

Can Transportation Be Joyful?

Mother and children on a single bike in Arnhem, Netherlands (look closely, there are four of them). Photo by me.

Close your eyes and think of the most joyful experience you’ve had related to transportation — anything from walking to riding a vehicle — since you were born.

Did you close your eyes?

I have a hunch that you recalled one of two situations: if the experience you remembered occurred in a motorized vehicle (a car, a motorbike), you were driving or being driven along a clear road; alternatively, you may have remembered a ride on a non-motorized vehicle (a bike, scooter or walking). My joyful experience would be a four-mile walk along a wide promenade in Seoul, South Korea or a bicycle ride to find the site of the first bicycle ride that took place 200 years ago in Mannheim, Germany. In any event, I would bet money that your joyful memory did not involve being stuck in stop-and-go traffic or at a complete standstill on a jammed freeway (unless you’re in the cast of La La Land).

A Kampala cyclist, smiling when he saw I was about to fall off a motorbike as I took this picture. Photo by me.

The data supports my hunch. A vast body of research supports the relationship between travel mode (or certain travel conditions) and happiness, mindfulness, joyfulness or another related concept. For instance, a 2012 look at how mindfulness relates to transport mode found that “walkers and bicyclists reported greater positive journey-based affect than drivers and bus users,” strongly suggesting that people who walk or cycle are, reportedly, happier. Researchers hypothesized that these findings were mainly the result of a sense of mastery or competence involved with those activities when compared to driving in traffic or riding a bus, and it is that sense of mastery that makes those who are walking or cycling feel good. In another analysis in 2019 on emotional well-being related to different modes of transportation, Jing Zhua and Yingling Fan found that “biking is the happiest,” while “public transit is the least happy and least meaningful” of several modes examined (as reported by one of the several news articles summarizing the findings). In addition, a 2018 study on the effects of transportation mode use on self-perceived physical health, mental health and social contact measures found that fewer feelings of loneliness and other indicators of positive mental health were most associated with cycling. That study also concluded that walking was also associated with good self-perceived health, higher vitality and more frequent contact with friends and family. Finally, in 2010, researchers found that people who do not own a car are happier with their work-related trips than with their own leisure trips(!).

There also are a number of oldie-but-goodie, must-read references on the happiness of travel and movement. Academic and anthropologist Nestor García Canclini named the experience of travel in itself a fundamental part of life in a city. In turn, this idea has been used by at least three researchers (physicist Cesare Marchetti, transportation analyst and engineer Yakov Zahavi and, more recently, academic David Metz) to demonstrate that people have an urge to move for around 60 minutes a day (give or take 15 minutes). Finally, any urbanist will immediately recall Baudelaire’s flâneur and the entire body of work the flâneur inspired, and perhaps the many famous quotations about cycling, including those from John F. Kennedy, H.G. Wells and even Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle.

NUMO staff enjoying a new mobility vehicle in an exhibit. Photo by me.

Now let’s jump back to current times and think about some forms of “new mobility.” More recently, there has been interest in identifying feelings related to new mobility services like electric scooters and electric bikes. One study even found that users of e-bikes are happier than users of other modes (find a good non-technical summary here). In the news, e-scooters appear to generate either hatred, happiness or both, though we haven’t really found consistent research to support any broad claims (aside from how Americans love e-scooter sharing programs). Anecdotally, we at NUMO have heard many stories of people being thrilled when they begin using e-bikes, and we know many people who, though new to e-scooters, also find them fun (this isn’t a plug for e-scooter or e-bike companies, promise!).

In partnership with Urbanism Next at the University of Oregon, NUMO researched new mobility pilots around the United States and Canada, and found that some new mobility services, namely small autonomous devices seen as “cute”. E-scooter and bikeshare users were those most likely to indicate that they used the service for fun or recreation. Seniors using transportation network companies or microtransit services for medical appointments or social outings may have experienced increased happiness and higher quality of life due to increased mobility and autonomy. Autonomous vehicles and personal delivery robots were viewed as exciting for some users due to their novelty.

Motorcycle riders smiling in Taipei, probably because they were about to run me over when their light turned green seconds after I pressed the shutter. Photo by me.

Research has also shown that there is generally little joy associated with commuting by car. In a 2006 survey across the U.S., the Pew Research Center found that from 1991 to the year of the study, there had been an increase in the number of people who considered driving a chore, while the number of people who liked to drive cars had declined. This trajectory stands in stark contrast to the idea, successfully exploited by automobile marketers, that our cars reflect our personalities or aspirations to the rest of the world. As NUMO director Harriet Tregoning says, “they have made a depreciating, durable good that most people use less than 5% of the time a coveted, high-speed and aggressive metal avatar.”

Of course, joy can also be found in the use of transportation modes for other, non-commuting purposes like recreation (even Muppets have been known to ride bikes for fun), though that feeling could be more similar to the effect of adrenaline (e.g. exhilaration due to high speeds) rather than actual joyfulness. In a wider sense, there are researchers who present incredibly persuasive arguments about automobile or motorcycle use as being a fundamental experience for human beings, citing craftsmanship and mastery. At the top of my list: writer and researcher Matthew Crawford’s “Shop Class As Soulcraft” and his most recent “Why We Drive,” though his overall argument is not so much about urban transportation but rather about the craft associated with building, maintaining and the overall operation of these vehicles. Thus, one could argue that there are aspects of traveling by car (and car culture in general) that can be associated with joyfulness when they are understood as part of a different set of values.

Where Is (or How Can We Introduce) Joyfulness in Transportation?

A Dutch cycling policy expert plays his tuba while riding a bike parade during summer 2017. Photo by me.

There have been many “interventions” to bring joyfulness to transportation, some of which you may have heard about: a Danish group (Copenhagen Phil) put a small orchestra in their metro and played Peer Gynt, and Despacio did the same with an entire 60-person choir inside an articulated bus (my explanation in Spanish of that experience is here). There was also that time when one person started laughing inside a metro carriage. That’s it. He just laughed, and it was great. And finally, anyone familiar with these “stunts” will always remember how Improv Everywhere started the No Pants Subway Ride, during which people are invited to (you guessed it) ride the subway without pants.

When I was writing this post, my colleague Sebastián Castellanos, also of NUMO (and you can read his most recent piece on using micromobility data to inform effective policy outcomes), reminded me that we at NUMO believe that change cannot happen if we don’t consider people’s more intimate feelings — that includes joyfulness. Transportation, therefore, should elicit feelings of joy instead of dread. And he’s right!

So what should we do, then, to increase (or introduce) joyfulness in transport? The examples I gave above regarding orchestras and random laughing in subways and pantless rides may have frightened you, dear reader, with their unorthodoxy. But to bring joyfulness to transportation, we need not stage elaborate actions, even though they can certainly spark momentary joyfulness. Instead, we can focus on doing small things to improve the joyfulness of our experience in moving from one place to another — and, more, importantly, to make that feeling long-lasting and something we immediately associate our daily transportation choices with. Some actions we can take are:

• Make it easier to access modes we know are more joyful than others by improving infrastructure designs, increasing accessible and safe infrastructure for these modes and creating funding for additional mileage. We already knew these shifts have positive environmental, societal and economic development benefits, so the more the better. In addition, we know that improving access to modes (walking, biking, etc.) that can be associated with joyfulness can even reduce the risk of transmitting the virus that causes COVID-19.
• Increase joyfulness in modes that, while not inherently joyful, are sustainable and fair. Riding the subway or bus may not be inherently joyful, but there certainly are ways to bring that experience to those modes that efficiently and sustainably move the greatest number of people. If you pause to think for a minute, you can definitely come up with more than three ways to make public transit more joyful. You can even be a copycat and put an orchestra or choir on a bus (shoot me a DM, and I’ll happily help you prepare a proposal).
• Acknowledge the joylessness of transport modes that are not so and that are also unsustainable and unjust. We should be very explicit about the lack of joy that individual motorized trips often confer upon society and ourselves. Nobody likes to be in traffic jams, and no one should have to breathe the polluted air they create (least of all cyclists and pedestrians). Why perpetuate joylessness for the sake of personal convenience? Some may say it’s just our human nature.
• Make joyfulness an integral metric of transportation systems. Typically, city planners and public agencies measure the performance of transportation systems with outdated and even harmful metrics. Level of service, for example, is widely used in the U.S., despite its unsafe, unjust, unsustainable and inefficient ramifications — though California has opted to measure its systems by vehicle miles traveled to prioritize designing for safety over speed. If the Kingdom of Bhutan can value GNH over GDP, then why can’t we conceive of ways to integrate joyfulness as a measure of our transportation systems?

A rare sighting of the author expressing joyfulness on camera (also, his first time on a Bullitt Cargo bike). Photo by Claudio Olivares.

A final note: as I was writing this blog, I began to compile photos depicting joyfulness in transportation. You can find the album, which is an ongoing project, here.

Carlos Pardo is NUMO’s senior manager of pilots. You can follow him on Twitter here. Follow NUMO on Twitter here.