Happiness and Traffic: An Analysis of Long Term Effects

Traffic has a profound effect on how humans perceive their own happiness. What remains to be seen, however, is whether the short term happiness losses associated with traffic lead to lower overall happiness for people living in areas with consistently high traffic. This paper looks at average traffic delays in major metropolitan cities in the United States and compares these delays to average happiness indices for each city. It is seen that traffic does have a measurable negative effect on a city’s overall happiness, but this effect is very small and does not account for much of the variation in city happiness.