This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: It's often the sight of heavy digging machinery that makes us question how our taxes and property taxes are being spent. As a new project begins, we may wonder why money is being spent on that and not on other things.
When governments decide whether to fund a new bike path, redesign a street or create a park in a growing suburb, they typically focus on travel-related benefits, like saving travel time and avoiding accidents. These benefits (known as benefit measurements) often focus on simple, practical elements—on getting from A to B. Sometimes benefit measurements also include life satisfaction ratings, how a project affects third parties and environmental impacts.
These measurements have been central to the design of 20-minute cities in recent years. But new research from the University of Sydney and the University of Melbourne suggests that we are leaving out an important well-being calculation—and it could be worth even more than what we're currently measuring. Most of us intuitively understand that a good life involves more than feeling satisfied.
For example, a good meal or a sunny afternoon can be pleasurable (or hedonic) but fleeting. A longer-term experience that goes beyond this hedonic state is called eudaimonic well-being. This form of well-being includes things like gaining a sense of purpose through connecting with loved ones, engaging in meaningful work and contributing to the common good.
Both aspects of well-being matter, but when transportation planners and urban designers assess the value of a project, only "life satisfaction" benefit measurements have been given a dollar value. This is mainly because life satisfaction aligns with economists' traditional notion of "utility," referring to factors like usefulness and other practical benefits. This led to our work on the estimation of monetary values for changes in life satisfaction, where we looked at changes in well-being.
These assigned monetary values have been used, for example, in cost-benefit analyses in Australia and, more commonly, in the United Kingdom. The U.K. and Australian monetary values for changes in life satisfaction are remarkably similar when expressed as a proportion of household income. However, longer-term eudaimonic factors have not been monetized and largely remain invisible in economic terms.
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