Zen in the Art of Travel Behavior: Using Visual Ethnography to Understand the Transit Experience

Much transportation research has sought to understand the factor's influencing people's decisions to travel via one mode or another. Bodies of literature, overwhelmingly quantitative, exist about mode choice and the demographics of travel behavior. Most of this research has focused on the who, what, when and why aspects of travel. Little research has sought to explain how people travel, particularly the experiential aspects of travel. This project seeks to fill this gap in the transportation literature by examining travel behavior and decision-making using firsthand visual accounts of transit users in Los Angeles.