Human Well-Being and Traffic Management

Within the area of mobility much discussion is going on about human well-being and how mobility can contribute to that. Human well-being is about everything what influences the well-being of people, in the broadest sense. It is about welfare beyond the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Mobility makes a valuable contribution to the welfare and well-being of people. It provides means for them so that they can reach important destinations and participate in activities, like jobs, all kinds of facilities (cultural, shopping, recreation, etc.) and social contacts. In this way mobility has a positive effect on physical and mental health. However, mobility can also decrease well-being, for example due to traffic unsafety, noise and environmental pollution and climate change. Also, the pros and cons of mobility could be unevenly distributed among certain groups of people, regions or even generations.

In this paper we look at the current contributions of traffic management to human well-being and we search for opportunities that could increase these contributions. The research consisted of a literature scan and two workshops. In the first workshop traffic management experts were connected with experts with a focus on human well-being. Together they discussed the possibilities of traffic management in relation to human well-being. In the second workshop the findings from literature and the first workshop were discussed with experts from the Dutch national road authority Rijkswaterstaat to test how these findings are aligned with practical experience.

The literature scan showed that not many studies make a clear link between traffic management and human well-being. The current focus of traffic management is mainly on accessibility (travel times and delays) and traffic safety. Widening this perspective to the dimensions of health and the living environment is desirable and advisable. There is also a gap between traffic management, that is mainly focussing on the short-term solution of specific problems, and the more umbrella approach of well-being. The opportunities of (operational) traffic management to directly contribute to human well-being are currently limited, due to the way that traffic management is organised. Policy should make clear choices and give directions with respect to the goals that should be achieved with traffic management. Then traffic management can apply those directions in practice, using a network perspective and the experience with multimodal approaches and distribution of the scarce capacity in all kinds of networks, to find the desired balance between the various societal goals.