Planning for the Future: The Role of Mobility in Residential and Lifestyle Choices of Baby Boomers and Older Adults

This study explores the extent to which Baby Boomers and older adults take mobility and transportation issues into consideration as they make individual residential and lifestyle plans for their future older years. While transportation and urban planners may be aware of what has been called a gray tsunami, little attention has been paid to how individuals weigh mobility in their decisions about living, working and playing in their older years. This project focuses on the extent to which mobility and transportation issues play into Baby Boomers’ and older adults’ decisions about future residence and lifestyle, and why such issues may be often overlooked rather than explicitly considered. Answering these questions will provide greater insight into the decisions that an aging population makes around future living. These results have the potential to suggest ways in which older adults might be encouraged to think about their future mobility needs in the process of making decisions, and to feed into broader work about decision making among older adults. They may also be useful for transportation and urban planners as they continue to plan for the changing demography of the population.