What's Your 'Mobility Biography'?

Nobody gets up in the morning and thoroughly considers every available transportation option before deciding how to travel that day. Yet, too often, that's how transportation researchers assume people operate: with an impossible degree of objectivity, rationality, and behavioral isolation. In reality, how we move in and around the city is influenced less by short-term choices and more by long-term events like getting a job, starting a family, or moving homes.

In the past decade some transportation scholars have started to address this limitation with a research approach called "mobility biographies" [PDF]. The basic idea is that daily travel habits form at major moments that can only be identified by considering the full trajectory of a person's life. A zoom lens is great when we want to know how people behave at a particular time and place; a panoramic view explains what motivated that behavior in the first place.