The cost-of-living crisis and the freedom to move: mobility, participation and wellbeing under financial pressure

Source abstract

This paper examines how rising cost-of-living pressures reshape everyday mobility, participation, and wellbeing through an integrated behavioural and psychosocial framework. Drawing on survey data from 1,532 residents of Greater Sydney, the study proposes a novel multidimensional conceptualisation of cost-of-living stress spanning housing, energy, fuel, and food pressures, while incorporating environmental concern as a comparative reference point to assess how broader long-term societal anxieties are positioned relative to more immediate financial pressures. The study also robustly examines how cost-of-stress translates to transport related behaviours. Methodologically, a comprehensive multi-stage approach combining segmentation analysis, exploratory factor analysis, latent wellbeing constructs, and hybrid ordered logit modelling is adopted. The resulting analysis identifies five distinct profiles of cost-of-living concern and examines how these differing pressures relate to behavioural adaptation, including changes in driving, public transport use, eating out, leisure participation, and household utility consumption. The findings show that essential pressures, particularly housing, food, and energy costs, dominate overall stress formation. Environmental concern remains salient across the population but operates as a comparatively less immediate source of stress relative to essential cost pressures. Behavioural adaptation to mitigate against rising cost-of-living is concentrated primarily in discretionary activities, alongside evidence of selective substitution toward public transport. Overall, the study provides a multidimensional account of how households negotiate rising living costs across everyday life, highlighting the interconnected relationships between financial stress, mobility, participation, and wellbeing.