“You are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic,” said a famous TomTom advertisement in 2010. The quote reminds us that it is not only the mobility system that needs updating, but also the way we think about mobility.

Across Europe and in the Netherlands, wellbeing has become an increasingly important ambition in urban mobility policy. And while the prevailing models prioritize efficiency and speed, these are only fragments of what moves people. There’s a contradiction: while well-being seems to be key, it rarely functions as a guiding principle in concrete mobility decisions. What happens if we design mobility taking the lived experiences of people as a starting point?

Our latest project with the Ministry Infrastructure and Water Management (DGMo) starts from that tension. Our core insight is that this gap is not primarily a data problem, but a mindset one, and bridging it requires more than better indicators – it requires attention to what we call mental infrastructure: the shared assumptions, questions and ways of thinking that shape how mobility is experienced and how policy is designed and evaluated.

Based on desk research, interviews with citizens and experts, and reflective analysis, this project reframes mobility not only as a system of flows, but as a sequence of meaningful experiences. It shows what current approaches overlook, what citizens actually experience, and what this implies for policy practice. The project condenses these findings into a practical toolkit and a set of next steps that enable ministries to explore wellbeing in mobility through learning, experimentation and partnerships — without abandoning existing policy frameworks. While projects that focus on mentality shifts and ideas tend to end up piled up in the form of flashy reports gathering dust, we chose a tangible, actionable format – a card set. The object features results from the research, trigger questions, and open ideas to go from thinking to acting, all while keeping debate heated and collective thinking at the core.

These kinds of exploratory outcomes are only possible when the conditions of exploration exist already within projects themselves - something that made a massive difference in the case of this project, where the team at the Ministry had the openness and set aside time and space to start a journey of discovery without necessarily knowing what would come out of that. That kind of experimental approach to technical challenges and systemic hurdles is precisely what innovation is all about – and allows for a different kind of knowledge to come forward.