Are unsatisfied commuters more likely to change residential or work location? Some evidence from Luxembourg

Despite extensive literature on commuting satisfaction, the question of how people adapt to commuting dissatisfaction has not been thoroughly analysed. In this study, a panel-based survey from 2013 to 2015 is used to analyse how people cope with commuting dissatisfaction in subsequent years. Cluster analysis is first used to identify different satisfaction profiles combining commuting time satisfaction (CTS) and work satisfaction (WS) in 2013. Cross-tabulations between these CTS-WS profiles and life events in subsequent years show that being dissatisfied results more frequently in changing workplaces than changing residences or changing car ownership. Consequently, we used results of this cluster analysis as input for a logistic regression examining which CTS-WS combination has the strongest influence on the likelihood of changing workplaces. Not surprisingly, results indicate that the cluster with a combination of low CTS and low WS has a higher probability of changing workplaces in the following year than the cluster with a combination of high CTS and high WS. Moreover, the cluster with high CTS but low WS has a stronger effect on changing workplaces than the cluster with the reverse combination. This suggests that dissatisfaction with work outweighs dissatisfaction with commuting time. This study is the first study to analyse the consequences of commuting time and work dissatisfaction. It enriches the research on commuting satisfaction by going beyond the effects of trip characteristics, subjective characteristics, built environment characteristics on commute satisfaction, and contributes to a prospective approach by opening new avenues for exploring the effects of commute dissatisfaction on changes in life events in subsequent years.