9 ms·

A Commuting Principle That Shaped Urban History

83 points by motiw 7y ago

Mordisquitos 7y ago
This agrees with my experience. I grew up in the centre of Madrid and I would always estimate around 30 minutes to get to any other part of the city by public transport.
- 2rsf 7y ago
  Same in Stockholm, 30 minutes is the definitive answer to calculating public transport times in the city and close by suburbs.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Takes about 1.5h to get end to end in Warsaw, between farthest peripheries. Getting to center is half that.
- elyobo 7y ago
  30 minutes from the centre of Melbourne doesn't get you all very far by public transport (or by car most of the time either). It's pretty sprawling.
peterwwillis 7y ago
> We must make do mostly with building up and densifying the urban areas we already have. As transportation goes, so go our cities. If we make transportation better, our cities can be less dense. So can't we make transportation better? What causes congestion? Car traffic. Why does car traffic cause congestion? It's an inefficient use of roads. What are some alternatives? 1) Build more roads. Sure, except it's expensive, time consuming, and you quickly run out of land, and would have to build them one on top of another. 2) Fit more people into existing roads. How? Buses, trolleys, trains, subways, vans. Build out the mass transit to the suburban enclaves. But all this supposes an urban center is also the only answer. What do people need to congregate in one place for? Usually to work in one place. But why work in one place? Due to division of labor, most of us don't do things with multiple completely different people on multiple completely different subjects; we're just not that collaborative. But you may need to transport your work to another group in a company. At a bank, all this is paper; in a car manufacturing plant, this is car parts. The former is done digitally now, and the latter could be done, again, by increased transportation efficiency. All the other things we use are already decentralized outside the city; schools, churches, supermarkets, health care, water, power, recreation. It's really just business, and the ability to work decentralized, that constricts where and how we live. Transportation will make it easier to decentralize. And we can start by giving up our cars. The other aspect of work decentralization I've already seen at a rental car facility. A computerized kiosk displayed a remote worker on screen, who processed my driver's license, credit card and rental information and directed me to my rental car. It was surprisingly trouble-free and pleasant, and only one of us needed to be there.
- DangitBobby 7y ago
  There are many classes of jobs that you must be physically present for. You must be physically there to make food, to build, to repair, to be security, to treat patients, to drive a bus, to build a boat. Things walk off of shelves if you don't have employees manning checkout stations. These all legitimately require your physical presence.
  - peterwwillis 7y ago
    A lot of those things are already automated. Machines that create pizzas, burgers, cocktails, robots that weld, security robots, remote medical care, driverless transportation. The rental car place had people there... two to move cars and clean them, and one to sit in an exit booth to check IDs against contracts and lower the tire-ripping thing. But they didn't need three people idling behind desks waiting to process people's policies.
    - DangitBobby 7y ago
      They are very rarely automated. And the jobs you don't need physical presence are outweighed by those you do, IMO.
tompccs 7y ago
Except that people didn't used to "commute" in the modern sense: many craftsmen worked from home, and large numbers were domestic servants. There is probably some other principle at work, of which modern commuting is a special case.
- tremon 7y ago
  While that may be true, I think it doesn't change the traffic factor much: "home office" users still need to sell their wares (their clientele must be able their house) or they need access to a local market. Similarly, people need market access to buy groceries and such. The typical "commuters" in those days were probably farmers, who traveled from outside to the city markets. But that wasn't a daily commute, probably once or twice a week.
brlewis 7y ago
Overall I liked this article. It describes an interesting though simple core principle. I have three criticisms: 1. The article is scientific enough that using "grew exponentially" in the colloquial sense of just "grew a lot" is grating. 2. The article gives the impression that Boston is an American city on a grid where elevated trains preceded subways and dominated the transportation system. In reality the core of the city was not at all a grid, subways came first, and subways have been more prevalent than elevated trains. 3. "the vaunted self-driving car, as imminent and yet illusory as nuclear fusion, will not transform the basic geometry of road capacity" This ignores the potential drastic reduction of space allocated for parking, including space that is already part of roadways.
- human20190310 7y ago
  I think "growing exponentially" is technically correct. Anything that grows at a rate proportional to its size is growing exponentially. The transportation innovations allowed cities to keep doing that, i.e. growing at X% per year instead of hitting some limit where population growth would force out-migration.
  - brlewis 7y ago
    OK yes there's a reasonable use of the term early in the article that I overlooked. It was the "streetcars and bicycles" section where it grated on me.
- blauditore 7y ago
  > This ignores the potential drastic reduction of space allocated for parking How so? If you mean because of more car sharing, I don't think that's going to happen. Most people would still want their own car. If you mean because of being able to let the car park itself outside the city, or even drive home: That would drive up cost for the owner and reduce convenience (having to "order" it 30 minutes ahead of time). In addition, it would worsen congestion on streets due to cars moving more.
  - cryptonector 7y ago
spodek 7y ago
> The best option is to densify our cities. This is hard, too Leveling off or lowering the human population through lower birth rates works better. I'm not saying it's simple or even possible since so many people jump to conclusions about eugenics etc, but reducing overpopulation makes a lot of problems easier. If we don't figure out how on our own, nature will do it for us so we might as well figure out how in a peaceful, fair way.
- ThrustVectoring 7y ago
  You also wind up with fewer able-bodied working-age adults, which brings with it its own problems. Specifically, with retiree standards of living; these are proportional to the retiree-to-worker ratio, average worker income, and the combined tax and savings rate on workers. Having fewer children means that when those children would be adults, people need to retire poorer and/or later.
- geogra4 7y ago
  Whether we like it or not, it's already happening. https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/06/2019-Revision-%E2%80%93-World-Population-Growth-1700-2100.png https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/06/2019-Revision-%E2... But this doesn't really solve the city/urban problem as the vast majority of economic growth occurs in cities and the continual migration of rural to urban happens even when total population is shrinking.
  - spodek 7y ago
    That chart shows a positive growth rate beyond 2100, which means continued exponential growth, not a decreasing population. Lowering population alone doesn't solve every problem, but without it, many problems are unsolvable.
- beat 7y ago
  The primary cause of population growth today is not birth rate, but rather death rate - people benefiting from modern society are living 10-20 years longer (or more) than their ancestors did just a generation or three earlier. The birth rate is at or near (or below) replacement in the vast majority of countries, and rapidly heading that direction in most of the rest. If you really want population control, you don't need eugenics - you need Logan's Run.
afarrell 7y ago
> the vaunted self-driving car, as imminent and yet illusory as nuclear fusion, will not transform the basic geometry of road capacity I'm not so sure about this. I've generally been someone with a lower tolerance for a long commute than the average person. Usually I've lived within a 20 minutes walk from my job. My wife and I have had flatmates for 4 out of our 5 years or marriage. I decided 2½ months ago that it was worth moving farther out in order for my wife and I to get more privacy. A big reason for this was that a friend who lived in the area told me that he usually got a seat on the line into central London. Indeed, having figured out an ethical way to always get a seat, my commute is significantly improved by my newfound ability to get into a writing habit. If driverless cars or driverless double-decker busses become widely available and many people have the ability to get one-shot commutes, then I suspect that more people will ride them.
cr0sh 7y ago
I liked the article, but I did wonder if the author understood what self-driving vehicles would allow for, providing that they had maybe 7-8 nines in reliability and safety (if that is even possible). People have already mentioned the idea of "sending the car back home to park" and "being able to do something else in the car while commuting". But there are other things the cars could do: 1. Trains of cars - convoys - drafting each other, reducing energy use, while also increasing road density (bumper-to-bumper traffic - but at highway speeds). 2. No more "traffic waves" on the freeway, nor "rubber necking" at accidents, both of which likely contribute to the congestion issue. 3. No-stop intersections - again at high-speeds - because cars could coordinate/negotiate their speeds and lanes to allow for "collision-free" operation (unfortunately, there will still probably be collisions - and they wouldn't be pretty). All of these options - and possibly others I haven't thought of - rely on things that self-driving vehicles don't yet have - mainly car-to-car communication - so all cars know where other cars are (even if they aren't within sight-lines of the sensors) and how fast they are moving. Basically a form of swarm robotics, with constraints on motion vectors. Of course, #3 (and maybe the other two) might not come about unless the chance of an accident drops to infinitesimally small values - perhaps it may not even be possible. Better safety systems for the occupants would likely need to be developed as well (for that "impossible" chance it would be needed). Such cars might also need to be "trained" on "how to crash to protect occupants" and/or how to coordinate a collision with another vehicle(s) in real-time as the collision unfolds, to minimize occupant danger - this again, would require a standardized mesh network and coding to be able to take advantage of all the sensor data that would flood in (and out - as sensors and actuators become disabled by the accident unfolding - maybe the other cars involved - or not involved - could share their information "from the outside" to allow the disabled car to take better actions or whatnot). It's actually a fascinating problem when I think about it - extremely complex, lots of parameters and such; I wonder if anyone is working on it? If not - they should...
- wolco 7y ago
  The answer is to park 20 feet in the air. When self driving is ready so will anti-gravity enhanced cars/trucks.
carapace 7y ago
I'd love to build a large subdivision with the streets laid out in a fractal curve: _ _ _|_ |__ __| | | | +---------- |__|__| | | _ _ _ _ |___ ___| _|_ | _|_ | +-------------- _ _ | _ _ |___|___| _|_ _|_ __ __ __ __ |_ | _| |_ | _| |_____ _____| _ | _ | _ | _ |__|__| | |__|__| | +================ __ __ | __ __ |_ | _| | |_ | _| |_____|_____| _ | _ _ | _ |__|__| |__|__| It would likely suck to live there, but the traffic patterns would be cool...
- microcolonel 7y ago
  Sounds like a good game of Cities: Skylines, call it Hilbertville.
logfromblammo 7y ago
For a while, I have occasionally considered the idea of turning the shopping mall inside-out. Rather than one building in the center, with a vast expanse of parking lot all around the perimeter, put the parking structure (and auto-service businesses) in the center, and place the shopping, offices, and restaurants around the edges. Then use elevators and horizontal transport systems to move people around quickly without needing their cars. Access from the outside would be by pickup/dropoff cars, public transport, and pedestrians, and building facades would be immediately adjacent to the street. I don't think you can go straight from an everyone-in-a-car culture to a walkable+public transit culture in one step. So first you get people to put their cars in places that are less in the way, by driving past their destination and parking on the other side of it from the main transit network connections. This allows things to be closer together for pedestrians and the vehicles that do not park. Imagine the degenerate case, where a worker in an office park wants to visit a store in the mall next door. When the office is surrounded by parking, and the mall is surrounded by parking, a direct walk requires traversal of two large parking lots, and the worker has an incentive to drive, from a parking space near their entrance to the office building, to a parking space near the mall entrance nearest their store. Turning the shops and offices inside-out, in the best case, puts the office and the shop directly across the street from one another, and the worker can cross on a pedestrian overpass faster than they can reach their car. In the worst case, the worker rides two ring-avators and two elevators, once to get to an office-mall adjacency point, down to street level, walk across, back up, and then ringwise again to get to the shop. To drive, the worker would have to walk into parking to reach their car, drive out to the exit, drive in to the mall parking, and walk out again to the shop. That's not entirely eliminated, and would likely occur when the offic and mall are further separated, but it does make walking directly slightly more attractive.

83 points by motiw 7y ago

This agrees with my experience. I grew up in the centre of Madrid and I would always estimate around 30 minutes to get to any other part of the city by public transport.

2rsf 7y ago
Same in Stockholm, 30 minutes is the definitive answer to calculating public transport times in the city and close by suburbs.
AstralStorm 7y ago
Takes about 1.5h to get end to end in Warsaw, between farthest peripheries. Getting to center is half that.
elyobo 7y ago
30 minutes from the centre of Melbourne doesn't get you all very far by public transport (or by car most of the time either). It's pretty sprawling.

peterwwillis 7y ago

> We must make do mostly with building up and densifying the urban areas we already have. As transportation goes, so go our cities. If we make transportation better, our cities can be less dense. So can't we make transportation better? What causes congestion? Car traffic. Why does car traffic cause congestion? It's an inefficient use of roads. What are some alternatives? 1) Build more roads. Sure, except it's expensive, time consuming, and you quickly run out of land, and would have to build them one on top of another. 2) Fit more people into existing roads. How? Buses, trolleys, trains, subways, vans. Build out the mass transit to the suburban enclaves. But all this supposes an urban center is also the only answer. What do people need to congregate in one place for? Usually to work in one place. But why work in one place? Due to division of labor, most of us don't do things with multiple completely different people on multiple completely different subjects; we're just not that collaborative. But you may need to transport your work to another group in a company. At a bank, all this is paper; in a car manufacturing plant, this is car parts. The former is done digitally now, and the latter could be done, again, by increased transportation efficiency. All the other things we use are already decentralized outside the city; schools, churches, supermarkets, health care, water, power, recreation. It's really just business, and the ability to work decentralized, that constricts where and how we live. Transportation will make it easier to decentralize. And we can start by giving up our cars. The other aspect of work decentralization I've already seen at a rental car facility. A computerized kiosk displayed a remote worker on screen, who processed my driver's license, credit card and rental information and directed me to my rental car. It was surprisingly trouble-free and pleasant, and only one of us needed to be there.

DangitBobby 7y ago
There are many classes of jobs that you must be physically present for. You must be physically there to make food, to build, to repair, to be security, to treat patients, to drive a bus, to build a boat. Things walk off of shelves if you don't have employees manning checkout stations. These all legitimately require your physical presence.
- peterwwillis 7y ago
  A lot of those things are already automated. Machines that create pizzas, burgers, cocktails, robots that weld, security robots, remote medical care, driverless transportation. The rental car place had people there... two to move cars and clean them, and one to sit in an exit booth to check IDs against contracts and lower the tire-ripping thing. But they didn't need three people idling behind desks waiting to process people's policies.
  - DangitBobby 7y ago
    They are very rarely automated. And the jobs you don't need physical presence are outweighed by those you do, IMO.

tompccs 7y ago

Except that people didn't used to "commute" in the modern sense: many craftsmen worked from home, and large numbers were domestic servants. There is probably some other principle at work, of which modern commuting is a special case.

tremon 7y ago
While that may be true, I think it doesn't change the traffic factor much: "home office" users still need to sell their wares (their clientele must be able their house) or they need access to a local market. Similarly, people need market access to buy groceries and such. The typical "commuters" in those days were probably farmers, who traveled from outside to the city markets. But that wasn't a daily commute, probably once or twice a week.

brlewis 7y ago

Overall I liked this article. It describes an interesting though simple core principle. I have three criticisms: 1. The article is scientific enough that using "grew exponentially" in the colloquial sense of just "grew a lot" is grating. 2. The article gives the impression that Boston is an American city on a grid where elevated trains preceded subways and dominated the transportation system. In reality the core of the city was not at all a grid, subways came first, and subways have been more prevalent than elevated trains. 3. "the vaunted self-driving car, as imminent and yet illusory as nuclear fusion, will not transform the basic geometry of road capacity" This ignores the potential drastic reduction of space allocated for parking, including space that is already part of roadways.

human20190310 7y ago
I think "growing exponentially" is technically correct. Anything that grows at a rate proportional to its size is growing exponentially. The transportation innovations allowed cities to keep doing that, i.e. growing at X% per year instead of hitting some limit where population growth would force out-migration.
- brlewis 7y ago
  OK yes there's a reasonable use of the term early in the article that I overlooked. It was the "streetcars and bicycles" section where it grated on me.
blauditore 7y ago
> This ignores the potential drastic reduction of space allocated for parking How so? If you mean because of more car sharing, I don't think that's going to happen. Most people would still want their own car. If you mean because of being able to let the car park itself outside the city, or even drive home: That would drive up cost for the owner and reduce convenience (having to "order" it 30 minutes ahead of time). In addition, it would worsen congestion on streets due to cars moving more.
- cryptonector 7y ago

spodek 7y ago

> The best option is to densify our cities. This is hard, too Leveling off or lowering the human population through lower birth rates works better. I'm not saying it's simple or even possible since so many people jump to conclusions about eugenics etc, but reducing overpopulation makes a lot of problems easier. If we don't figure out how on our own, nature will do it for us so we might as well figure out how in a peaceful, fair way.

ThrustVectoring 7y ago
You also wind up with fewer able-bodied working-age adults, which brings with it its own problems. Specifically, with retiree standards of living; these are proportional to the retiree-to-worker ratio, average worker income, and the combined tax and savings rate on workers. Having fewer children means that when those children would be adults, people need to retire poorer and/or later.
geogra4 7y ago
Whether we like it or not, it's already happening. https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/06/2019-Revision-%E2%80%93-World-Population-Growth-1700-2100.png https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/06/2019-Revision-%E2... But this doesn't really solve the city/urban problem as the vast majority of economic growth occurs in cities and the continual migration of rural to urban happens even when total population is shrinking.
- spodek 7y ago
  That chart shows a positive growth rate beyond 2100, which means continued exponential growth, not a decreasing population. Lowering population alone doesn't solve every problem, but without it, many problems are unsolvable.
beat 7y ago
The primary cause of population growth today is not birth rate, but rather death rate - people benefiting from modern society are living 10-20 years longer (or more) than their ancestors did just a generation or three earlier. The birth rate is at or near (or below) replacement in the vast majority of countries, and rapidly heading that direction in most of the rest. If you really want population control, you don't need eugenics - you need Logan's Run.

afarrell 7y ago

> the vaunted self-driving car, as imminent and yet illusory as nuclear fusion, will not transform the basic geometry of road capacity I'm not so sure about this. I've generally been someone with a lower tolerance for a long commute than the average person. Usually I've lived within a 20 minutes walk from my job. My wife and I have had flatmates for 4 out of our 5 years or marriage. I decided 2½ months ago that it was worth moving farther out in order for my wife and I to get more privacy. A big reason for this was that a friend who lived in the area told me that he usually got a seat on the line into central London. Indeed, having figured out an ethical way to always get a seat, my commute is significantly improved by my newfound ability to get into a writing habit. If driverless cars or driverless double-decker busses become widely available and many people have the ability to get one-shot commutes, then I suspect that more people will ride them.

cr0sh 7y ago

I liked the article, but I did wonder if the author understood what self-driving vehicles would allow for, providing that they had maybe 7-8 nines in reliability and safety (if that is even possible). People have already mentioned the idea of "sending the car back home to park" and "being able to do something else in the car while commuting". But there are other things the cars could do: 1. Trains of cars - convoys - drafting each other, reducing energy use, while also increasing road density (bumper-to-bumper traffic - but at highway speeds). 2. No more "traffic waves" on the freeway, nor "rubber necking" at accidents, both of which likely contribute to the congestion issue. 3. No-stop intersections - again at high-speeds - because cars could coordinate/negotiate their speeds and lanes to allow for "collision-free" operation (unfortunately, there will still probably be collisions - and they wouldn't be pretty). All of these options - and possibly others I haven't thought of - rely on things that self-driving vehicles don't yet have - mainly car-to-car communication - so all cars know where other cars are (even if they aren't within sight-lines of the sensors) and how fast they are moving. Basically a form of swarm robotics, with constraints on motion vectors. Of course, #3 (and maybe the other two) might not come about unless the chance of an accident drops to infinitesimally small values - perhaps it may not even be possible. Better safety systems for the occupants would likely need to be developed as well (for that "impossible" chance it would be needed). Such cars might also need to be "trained" on "how to crash to protect occupants" and/or how to coordinate a collision with another vehicle(s) in real-time as the collision unfolds, to minimize occupant danger - this again, would require a standardized mesh network and coding to be able to take advantage of all the sensor data that would flood in (and out - as sensors and actuators become disabled by the accident unfolding - maybe the other cars involved - or not involved - could share their information "from the outside" to allow the disabled car to take better actions or whatnot). It's actually a fascinating problem when I think about it - extremely complex, lots of parameters and such; I wonder if anyone is working on it? If not - they should...

wolco 7y ago
The answer is to park 20 feet in the air. When self driving is ready so will anti-gravity enhanced cars/trucks.

carapace 7y ago

I'd love to build a large subdivision with the streets laid out in a fractal curve: _ _ _|_ |__ __| | | | +---------- |__|__| | | _ _ _ _ |___ ___| _|_ | _|_ | +-------------- _ _ | _ _ |___|___| _|_ _|_ __ __ __ __ |_ | _| |_ | _| |_____ _____| _ | _ | _ | _ |__|__| | |__|__| | +================ __ __ | __ __ |_ | _| | |_ | _| |_____|_____| _ | _ _ | _ |__|__| |__|__| It would likely suck to live there, but the traffic patterns would be cool...

microcolonel 7y ago
Sounds like a good game of Cities: Skylines, call it Hilbertville.

logfromblammo 7y ago

For a while, I have occasionally considered the idea of turning the shopping mall inside-out. Rather than one building in the center, with a vast expanse of parking lot all around the perimeter, put the parking structure (and auto-service businesses) in the center, and place the shopping, offices, and restaurants around the edges. Then use elevators and horizontal transport systems to move people around quickly without needing their cars. Access from the outside would be by pickup/dropoff cars, public transport, and pedestrians, and building facades would be immediately adjacent to the street. I don't think you can go straight from an everyone-in-a-car culture to a walkable+public transit culture in one step. So first you get people to put their cars in places that are less in the way, by driving past their destination and parking on the other side of it from the main transit network connections. This allows things to be closer together for pedestrians and the vehicles that do not park. Imagine the degenerate case, where a worker in an office park wants to visit a store in the mall next door. When the office is surrounded by parking, and the mall is surrounded by parking, a direct walk requires traversal of two large parking lots, and the worker has an incentive to drive, from a parking space near their entrance to the office building, to a parking space near the mall entrance nearest their store. Turning the shops and offices inside-out, in the best case, puts the office and the shop directly across the street from one another, and the worker can cross on a pedestrian overpass faster than they can reach their car. In the worst case, the worker rides two ring-avators and two elevators, once to get to an office-mall adjacency point, down to street level, walk across, back up, and then ringwise again to get to the shop. To drive, the worker would have to walk into parking to reach their car, drive out to the exit, drive in to the mall parking, and walk out again to the shop. That's not entirely eliminated, and would likely occur when the offic and mall are further separated, but it does make walking directly slightly more attractive.