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Why It’s So Hard to Change People’s Commuting Behavior

• NPMaxwell 7y ago
  "Nudging is particularly effective at shaping one-off behaviors, such as getting flu shots, but it hasn’t yet been shown to be as reliably effective at changing decisions that require daily actions," Makes sense: daily actions have emerged from extensive exposure to competing nudges that continue and have culminated in producing the current behavior. When you add your one nudge, it may get some attention as something novel, but then it will be overwhelmed.
• dpflan 7y ago
  One proposal from the authors is to “Make driving harder, and make other forms of commuting easier”. Is sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on a highway convenient or a cost of convenience (e.g. direct transport to your destination)? I would say that traffic makes driving much harder, physically (extending the time seated) and emotionally (stress, “road rage”). But yes, creating a new habit like better commuting is hard and hard to do with just a 1-week intervention.
• nradov 7y ago
  The authors missed some important causes about why commuters prefer to drive personal vehicles. If they were going straight from home to work and back again then carpooling or public transit would often be fine. But real workers often need to make extra stops at schools, child care, stores, gyms, club meetings, etc. Making driving harder and more expensive for those workers only serves to punish them without offering any practical alternatives.
  • piinbinary 7y ago
    Agreed. And commuting individually may meet another class of needs: It may be the only alone time some people can get all day. (edited: typo)
    • kiliantics 7y ago
      I consider myself alone when on a bus or train, unless traveling with a friend
      • bobthepanda 7y ago
        Even better, it's alone time that's not constrained to keeping your eyes on the road. You could read a book, play a handheld console, browse your phone, etc.
        • coredog64 7y ago
          Or you could spend that hour holding on to the railing because the car is so full there's no seat, there's no personal space to hold your Kindle, and there's no consistent network connection that would allow you to consume anything but the smallest content. (I would say that's a reasonable capsule summary of my commute from Bowling Green to UES via the 4/5/6 unless I decided to stay at work for an extra 90-120 minutes to allow the rush hour crowd to clear out. Naturally all bets are off if the Yankees are playing.)
          • bobthepanda 7y ago
            Granted, the 4/5/6 is an outlier; due to being the only subway line running the full length of Manhattan's East Side, it carries (or carried) more people than DC's entire metro, and more than Boston's, Chicago's, and San Francisco's combined, which would round out the top 5 rail systems in the US in terms of passengers carried. The vast majority of rail lines that exist or would be reasonable to build in the US would not have this problem.
          • Noumenon72 7y ago
            For offline content, click the Pocket icon in your Firefox address bar to save an article for later.
          • KozmoNau7 7y ago
            Bring a book, have music and other content stored locally on you phone. Listen to music with your phone in your pocket. You don't have to stare at a screen 24/7.
  • btrettel 7y ago
    Cycling also can go directly to specific locations, yet cycling is rare. For the particular case you described, the extra time (in most cases), the lack of cargo capacity, and the inability to take more than one person might explain this. And I don't underestimate the stigma against cyclists or how much work people believe cycling is.
    • bobthepanda 7y ago
      In recent years electric bikes have become cheaper and more common and are definitely a way to solve this problem. The only reason I don‘t own one is because outside of house and work there are few good secure locations to park a bike, and the area has a high rate of property crime.
      • ben7799 7y ago
        Bikes generally fail pretty miserably at trucking children around. You're pretty much stuck going right to one of the giant dutch cargo bikes to carry kids and all their paraphernalia, and once you drop off your kid now you're riding a very slow very heavy bike that will take much longer to ride to your office and leave you much sweatier, especially since there's no flat easy bike infrastructure like the Netherlands. I'm a long time cyclist and I've done stuff like take my kid to daycare in a Burley trailer and lock the trailer at the day care and then ride the bike to my office, then go and bike to the daycare and hook the Burley back up but this stuff takes a tremendous amount of time. It's a LOT harder than bike commuting as a single person with a more flexible schedule. Day cares/schools put a lot of requirements on when you drop off and when you pick up which make it much harder to shift your schedule around to make bike commuting work as well.
        • bobthepanda 7y ago
          Electric bikes these days have ranges of 40+ miles, and provide assistance to maintain 20-25 mph, which would solve the "slow, very heavy bike" issue.
      • sojournerc 7y ago
  • dfxm12 7y ago
    Making driving harder and more expensive for those workers only serves to punish them without offering any practical alternatives. There's nothing wrong with this, with the understanding that drivers' daily commutes are already subsidized and the article talks about making this salient to commuters. I wouldn't describe taking away a subsidy as a punishment or penalty, though. Also, the article talks about the possibility of giving alternative commuters the carrot rather than lone drivers the stick anyway.
    • nradov 7y ago
      This type of elitist, out-of-touch proposal is how you get populist movements like the "Yellow Vest" protests recently in France. In a democracy it's tough to get people to vote for politicians who make their daily lives worse, regardless of the potential long-term benefits. Sure from an idealized economics standpoint we ought to eliminate subsidies and price in externalities. But it's challenging to eliminate them once they exist.
      • thawaway1837 7y ago
        It’s absolutely elitist to privilege a mode of transportation that requires upfront personal costs of tens of thousands of dollars, and running costs of hundreds of dollars on a daily basis, over modes of transportation that can be achieved for a few dollars a day... /sarcasm And that’s before we even look at the negative externalities of cars, around the tens of thousands of deaths caused directly in car accidents, the tens of billions of dollars of GDP wasted in people idling in cars during traffic, the many lives and billions of dollars in GDP due to worse health outcomes due to pollution, and the increasingly apparent climate change related costs.
        • coredog64 7y ago
          Plenty of people get by with a $2000 used Toyota that might cost another $8/day in fuel, maintenance, and insurance. If mass transit is $5-6/day, that's not a crazy personal choice to make.
  • bobthepanda 7y ago
    You can do all of those things by walking or transit if your community is built for it. It just so happens that Americans have placed everything to require driving, so all these places need massive surface lots, spreading things out even further and then requiring even more driving and disadvantaging non-driving modes in a vicious cycle.
    • swiley 7y ago
      Surface lots might not be so bad if people could camp in their cars, it would probably put a lot of downward pressure on the housing market and help homeless people. Those ideas tend to not be popular though.
      • bobthepanda 7y ago
        Surface lots mostly only exist because of arbitrary government regulation requiring a minimum amount of parking. It's clearly too high, since the vast majority of developers will only ever build the absolute minimum number of parking required, and even during the busiest shopping days of the year American parking lots aren't really full. It would be a lot better to just free up the parking lots as actual developable land.
      • cscurmudgeon 7y ago
        Camp in parking lots with children and elderly parents?
    • dionidium 7y ago
      If you put everything in your house up on 20-ft-high shelves, then you'll need a ladder to reach anything. I don't need a ladder to reach anything in my house, because I don't keep things up on 20-ft-high-shelves. We used to design cities so that your school, child care, stores, gyms, club meetings, and everything else, were in one neighborhood. Why would you want them anywhere else? Now we build cities so that these things are far from one another. It's like putting everything up on 20-ft-high-shelves and insisting every house needs a series of ladders.
  • TulliusCicero 7y ago
    In cities in many other countries, people do those things using public transit and walking and biking and it works fine. Admittedly, it works not so fine in US cities...because they were built to favor driving over every other mode. Drop an American in Munich or Tokyo and suddenly you'll find them driving a whole lot less, even if they still own a car.
    • arkades 7y ago
      OP: “punishing personal driving penalizes people for undertaking necessary tasks using the only infrastructure reasonable in that setting.” You: “well in other settings it works. Of course, those settings have other infrastructure.” You can see why that doesn’t really add much.
      • jeddy3 7y ago
        Your paraphrasing is really dishonest. OP never talks about any setting, only "real workers need to". In fact you both seem to ignore the setting from the article, which is major European City
        • arkades 7y ago
          It’s not meant to be dishonest. I take for granted that the existence of a setting is implied, insofar as people are discussing non-hypothetical commuting.
    • ummonk 7y ago
      Yes, it works in dense cities. That doesn't mean it works for everyone, as Macron found out when he tried to raise petrol taxes.
  • walshemj 7y ago
    And also an airport works extended hours if not 24/7 so for those starting early or finishing late public transport my not be as practicable as a strict 9-5 job
• analog31 7y ago
  >>>> The nudges that we tried would likely have been more successful if employees had to bear the full costs of their commuting decisions. Employees already voluntarily increase those costs if they can, by buying more expensive and less efficient vehicles. The only thing I've read that makes sense is for people to live closer to things, and that's hard to make happen overnight. For instance, as a bicycle commuter, I'm aware that many if not most of my colleagues live many miles from work. Thus the debate about transportation mode is practically moot.
  • btrettel 7y ago
    > For instance, as a bicycle commuter, I'm aware that many if not most of my colleagues live many miles from work. Thus the debate about transportation mode is practically moot. Yes, as a cyclist myself I've had people tell me "Cycling is impossible in my case because of the distance." But what they've actually done is optimize for driving, which makes cycling inconvenient. If they optimized for cycling then driving might be inconvenient! If someone wants to make an intervention here they need to catch people at a particular time (i.e., moving) rather than random times.
    • damnyou 7y ago
      No, people are optimizing for things like family over work (which is good and should be strongly encouraged as part of work-life balance). It just so happens that driving is the most flexible way to get to work, so it looks like they're optimizing for driving.
    • maxsilver 7y ago
      > But what they've actually done is optimize for driving, which makes cycling inconvenient Did they optimize for driving, or optimize for affordability? At every place I've ever worked, "optimize for cycling" has actually meant "optimize for being a millionaire". The housing near work is literally 250% more expensive than regular housing, and most people can't afford that. And even if you do optimize for cycling, at some point you'll have to get a new job that wrecks this plan. Do you force your family to move every 2-3 years, everytime you get a new job, so you can continue to live cycling-distance to it? If you have a spouse, which of the two of you gets to live cycling-distance to work?
• scrooched_moose 7y ago
  The biggest issue I've seen with public transportation is it almost always works on some varient of a hub and spoke system. If you don't a) Live downtown and commute to a suburb, or b) Live in a suburb and commute downtown it's basically useless. I live SE from downtown and work due south of downtown. To bus to work, I'd have to take a 30 minute bus downtown, then a 45 minute bus back out to work. My drive is only 25 minutes. Until they dramatically expand the bus lines, my only option is to either move or pursue a job that matches our transportation system.
  • hateful 7y ago
    The only thing that's going to change things is the freedom of being able to travel directly from point A to point B without having to go to other points in between. Right your at your house "A" and you need to go your job "B", but to take public transportation you have to go to bus stop "C" and take it to bus stop "D", and then on to "B" (and that's best case scenario). Where I'm from (Long Island, NY) most of the public transport goes either east to west or north to south, with more going east to west (including trains). So if you want to go North East, forget about it. The only way to solve this is through more automation - not just self driving automation, but even just the automation of a matching system. Sometimes I wonder if someone like Uber came out with an "Uber-Commute" service, if it would take off. You could pay a monthly fee, so you pay even when you don't use it. We could have self-driving now, if we started with the infrastructure for it, but unfortunately that's not easy. At the very least we could have "self driving" lanes everywhere for single person "pod" vehicles - that would be neat.
  • Merrill 7y ago
    More metro areas should have mass transit along the ring highways connecting the edge cities and close in suburbs. Airports and commuter rail stations are also often along the ring highways or on short stubs off them. There is no reason to focus business in the urban core, rather than in office parks and industrial areas around the periphery. People who want to live in the urban core can reverse commute to jobs on the ring.
    • smileysteve 7y ago
• jokoon 7y ago
  France now has blablalines, a carpooling service extension of blablacar. Basically it's designed to carpool small distances where the driver can pick up passengers on his way to work. It might be a little bit difficult to set up for users, but there is a lot of potential to save money with this.
• melling 7y ago
  “Make the full cost of driving salient for employees” Give them the stick!! Seriously, why don’t we simply improve mass transit so more people want to take it? Even in NYC where it’s the best in America, it can still be painful. Try commuting from Brooklyn to NJ, or 4 miles to the east side of Manhattan from NJ. 25 years ago I lived 50 miles from Manhattan and the best an express train could do was 65 minutes to the city. I even wrote a letter to MetroNorth. We’re about to enter the third decade of the 21st Century. How about trains that go 125 mph? Where are the maglevs? China, of course: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-driverless-maglev-trains/index.html https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-driverless-maglev-t...
  • monksy 7y ago
    > Even in NYC where it’s the best in America, it can still be painful. Try commuting from Brooklyn to NJ, or 4 miles to the east side of Manhattan from NJ. Or east-west in Chicago via train or North/South without hitting the red line. RANT Everytime the circle line is mentioned in Chicago you always get the crap that "it's too expensive". It's always going to be "too expensive." sigh.
  • bluGill 7y ago
    To answer your first question: why can't we improve it. We don't know how to do that. A lot of money has been spent building "better" transit systems that nobody took. We would be equally as effective if we just paid the people building those systems to dig a hole and fill it back in, if we had them dig in their backyard we could have saved all the pollution of their commute to the job site. NYC is hurt because their costs to build something are typically 7 times what it would cost to build the same thing in Spain. (health care, cost of living, and harder soils should make NYC 1.25x harder than Spain, every other explanation of why this is I've seen doesn't stand when examined closer) Until NYC can get their costs under control they it doesn't make sense to build much more mass transit, roads are a better value. As for maglevs: they are a cute boondoggle, but not worth the expense. China isn't building them anymore because the cost isn't worth it. You can build 150mph trains without it for much less. This will probably change, but the reality is it isn't worth spending your own city/countries' money on it. The US could build maglev if we wanted, but it is a much better idea to just update and fix what we have already (Amtrak is historically incompetent, there are hopeful signs that might change but I'll wait to pass judgement on those signs for 20 years - there were signs 20 years ago that didn't amount to anything) Even if we solve the above, inertia is a hard problem. I have a car, the roads take me where I want to go, when I want to go, very quickly (except in congestion cases). It is very hard for mass transit to compete with that. Transit often doesn't get people where they want to go - political issues (like your NJ to Brooklyn) mean transit doesn't cross borders the road does. Often even if it does your costs go up even though the trip was short (that is your 4 mile trip is twice as much as a 20 mile trip if you hadn't crossed that border). Cars go when you want to go. Many transit systems run so rarely that you have to check the bus schedule before going anywhere. People who drive don't realize how critical this is because it never occurs to them that running late isn't arriving 2 minutes after the meeting starts, but a full hour. Quick is important. I'm trying to get someplace, not take a tour of the neighborhood (that was neat the first time, after that it is boring). Every time the bus stops to let someone else on/off that is robbing me of a couple minutes of my time, this can be acceptable if it is a quick stop - but if the bus has to spend several minutes going down a cul-de-sac it is unacceptable (note that a cul-de-sac where the end is still walking distance to the stop isn't bad, it is only when it is long enough that the bus would need to turn down it to get people that it is bad). This last is why transit advocates spend more time talking about zoning than transit - most suburbs in the US are dense enough that transit could be useful for not much cost (that is less than the cost of all the freeways we build). However the street design means there is no way to run useful buses.
• kiliantics 7y ago
  It all comes down to money in the end. Because of the cheap prices of gasoline and parking, there is usually no financial incentive to take public transit. Even in NYC, which probably has the cheapest, widest coverage of transit, you still have to pay about $3 each way. But you can drive and park for less than that for most commute distances. (Not counting car maintenance, insurance, and other "fixed costs" of driving of course.) Cycling is a good exception to this, but there is almost no culture supporting the use of bikes (or scooters etc.) and very little planned infrastructure, which leads to extreme hostility from drivers and ultimately to injury and death (just about 30 cyclists this year alone in NYC). City governments are at fault and should be brought to account for this. However, most media attention uses language that implicitly (or sometimes even explicitly) blames the actions of pedestrians and cyclists when they are victims of car violence, rather than the drivers or the design of the city. Even when drivers are themselves blamed, it is assumed that tragic events are only caused by rare incidents involving "bad" drivers, rather than a pervasive culture and systemic organisation that allows for these tragic events to continue unhindered. There needs to be a strong social backlash against almost any form of personal use of heavy machinery equipped with combustion engines, that is not absolutely necessary, within regions where there are many unprotected people on foot/bike/etc. And this must be directed at governments and other institutions that have the power to but are currently unwilling to create such necessary change. Blaming individuals will not get us there and will only lead to further entrenched "culture war". This is the strategy that was used in the Netherlands which, prior to the 80s, had a very similar commuting landscape to the US but now has massive bicycle and public transit use.
  • boring_twenties 7y ago
    > But you can drive and park for less than that for most commute distances. Uh no. Parking in Manhattan is like $500 a month.
• 300bps 7y ago
  Not fully on topic but one commuting behavior I changed about eighteen months ago has been resoundingly helpful. I stopped driving like a jackass. I used to accelerate rapidly at every green light and decelerate rapidly at every red light. I stopped doing both of these things. I went from an average of getting 267 miles per tank of gas to 322, an over 20% increase. Instead of wondering why my tires and brakes lasted half as long as everyone else they now last longer than average. The amazing thing is I get to my destinations just as quickly. I always used to wonder how the ETA was still accurate on Waze even when I drove at full speed. All I was doing was racing to the next red light. I’m embarrassed writing this because I drove so stupidly for so long. If it helps anyone else, here is my stupidity for all to see.
  • arethuza 7y ago
    I did something similar about 10 years ago after getting a speeding ticket - drive within the speed limit and don't be aggressive. I found it made a huge difference: less fuel used, less wear and tear on car and far less stressful. I also noticed that I didn't seem to get anywhere that much slower...
  • okcando 7y ago
    I went through a similar change from my sparkier first years of driving as a teen and early twenty something to now. The motivation incidentally wasn't to improve economy or avoid citations. It was mostly to reduce the frustration of feeling like I was constantly being impeded by others who weren't interested in driving as aggressively as I had been, and partially an increased interest in safety. It worked. Driving is much less stressful with cruise control.
• sys_64738 7y ago
  Rather than try to put in barriers for driving, make it faster and easier to drive. Build bigger highways and make more parking available to employees. The biggest polluters are not the cars but the petroleum companies who pollute the atmosphere. Want to save the environment then stop with daft plastic straws banning as that might be the low hanging fruit but it ain't the core problem.
  • yohannparis 7y ago
    Great idea! But make the users bare the cost. I do not want to pay for other users' parking and highways. End all subsidies to all transportation modes, or being transparent about the political goals.
  • kqr 7y ago
    Right on! History has shown time and time again that building larger roads makes these roads less congested. See also "one more lane will fix it" : https://mobile.twitter.com/urbanthoughts11/status/1191295205187686400 https://mobile.twitter.com/urbanthoughts11/status/1191295205...
  • zootam 7y ago
    >but it ain't the core problem What do you consider to be the core problem? I think the root cause is expensive housing. Increasing throughput on the highways often only lets more people get to the same bottleneck in the same time. To actually alleviate that problem, the throughput of any bottlenecks would need to increase as well. Usually, that's in a highly desirable and expensive area. Destroying much of the highly desirable and expensive area and covering it with highways and parking lots is one way to solve the problem, but is obviously a terrible idea.
• herodotus 7y ago
  Vancouver added a train service from downtown to the Airport and Richmond that was ready for the 2010 Winter Olympics. It was almost instantly running close to capacity (and still is). Along with a reasonably good choice of where the line would run, and where the stops would be, the city embarked on a rezoning project that would allow the space near the line to become medium (or in one case) high density. I am not saying it is a perfect system, but all it took to change peoples commuting behaviour was the availability of a good alternative to cars. There is more than just initial design, however: there are many design elements that add to its drawing power. These include accessibility, good "way finding" signs, frequency of trains (every 3 minutes in busy times), safety on platforms, and (for me anyway), signs that accurately show arrival times of the next three trains. Of course, there is still the problem of making the system useful for people who are not close enough to walk to a stop, the answer being good feeder bus service and car parks. In this respect, Vancouver has been less successful. For example, only a few bus stops have electronic signs showing the arrival times of the next bus, and bus frequency on all but the major routes is too low. My point is that good overall design is the almost certainly the most effective way to change people's commuting behaviour.
  • baybal2 7y ago
    That's because Vancouver is a relatively small, and dense city, and has a lot of people with countries where people think of good public transport as something taken. It's important to make public transport good enough for people to use it. When public transport is an inferior option to owning a car, people would not use it. I think what urban planners in the West miss is that public transport scales non-linearly. The bigger the city, the more you gain from owning a car. For a public transport to be viable in a megacity, the network needs to be like much, much, better than in a smaller city. When planners miss that, you get both terrible car traffic, and terrible public transport
    • ido 7y ago
      I disagree after having lived in 4 cities with metropolitan populations of 500k to 4.5m: In the smallest town driving was ok cause there wasn't as much traffic. In the largest driving anywhere central would usually mean getting stuck in traffic and parking was expensive and hard to find.
• 5555624 7y ago
  >Make the full cost of driving salient for employees The problem that I usually see when someone brings up this idea is that the employee's "cost" is ignored. I used to live in the Washington, D.C. area, where I could walk or take the bus to the subway. One way, the total time was 30 minutes longer than driving. Between the cost of the subway and my time, it was cheaper to drive. For 18 years, I commuted year-round by bike, rather than drive. It took as long as the bus-subway combination from my last apartment. While it took more time, I did not have to pay for gas and my maintenance costs were minimal.
  • samatman 7y ago
    To some reasonable limit, it's appropriate to budget time on a bike as 'free'. Most people don't get as much exercise as they should; time spent biking should be considered as saving free time one would otherwise spend getting exercise.
    • nrp 7y ago
      You could even call it a negative cost for the potential savings on health care from getting regular cardio exercise! Give employees a discount on health insurance costs if they bike or walk to work.
    • Frost1x 7y ago
      Cold and hot conditions in certain climates makes this even more challenging. An on premise shower and storage area for clothing would make it a bit more feasible. There's also the inherent risks of cycling around careless drivers. With a car, in out money in an accident. On a bicycle I can be out things money cant replace.
• robbiemitchell 7y ago
  This is a surprisingly limited study for HBR. - They sent direct mail and pamphlets, each of which has terrible conversion rates in general. Why not email or SMS? - What was the signup/enrollment like? Was it easy and something that could be done from a phone without a login/password setup, or did it involve mailing forms to some random office with an unclear timeline? - Did they assess why people didn’t enroll? If you want people to engage in something new, make it ridiculously easy.
  • bluGill 7y ago
    The send many letters, got 100 people to sign up, and 3 were car pooling a month latter. That 3 out of 100 number is the most important thing. 100 people who self selected as willing to car pool but only 3 were actually able to pull it off. Understanding the reason of those other 97 is completely missing: they should have abandoned all efforts increase car pooling until they got about 60 more people who self selected into a car pool. (60 is a somewhat random number, the point for some who are interested it is impossible to fix whatever reason there can't, but for many it should be). If you can't get people interested in something to do it you need to figure our why first.
• hateful 7y ago
  > Commuting alone by car is not just bad for the environment (24% of global energy-related CO2 emissions come from transportation) I'm all for doing what's right for the environment, but I can't stand tricky uses of statistics. That statistic has almost nothing to do with the proceeding statement. This is also a great of example of trying to blame environmental issues on individuals (see: recycling).
  • boxfire 7y ago
    Yeah what percent of that 24 percent is actually commuters? I have no idea but I'd wager single digits. I honestly stopped right at the start of the article because reading this told me this was an agenda piece likely the outcome of a risk management firm's press stash.
• johngalt 7y ago
  The individual person changing their commute doesn't capture the benefits of the change. If I take the bus, it takes one car off the road for everyone else, but it also makes my commute longer. Additionally, human beings aren't perfectly rational. Driving a car individually is like fast food, even if it were bad for you in real terms, people would still use it because it's easy and convenient. This is also behind the success of ride-sharing and food delivery apps. They put convenience front and center. IMHO, the way to change commuting behavior is to place an extreme bias on the right of way of mass transit methods. People will take the bus, if the bus doesn't have to wait in traffic. Then improve convenience with an app like interface that maps out transfers. Make it so taking a bus is as easy as taking an Uber/lyft. Then don't bother trying to change the habits of people who have already been commuting for a decade, instead try to accommodate the growing non-driving younger segment of the population. Make it so the college student doesn't have to buy that car to begin with, and their habits will stay with them as an adult.
  • toyg 7y ago
    > Make it so the college student doesn't have to buy that car to begin with, and their habits will stay with them as an adult. This would also help revitalise small shops, which have been decimated by the combination of malls and internet shopping. Two birds with one stone. Sadly, all the moneyed interests are aligned against this model. > People will take the bus, if the bus doesn't have to wait in traffic. And if it's easy to hop on and off, and pay fees that are not extortionate. In the UK, just the other day, I took a bus to travel a path that I often do in a minicab or uber; it cost £ 2.90, where a minicab would have charged me £ 4.50. The difference in annoyance (walking to the stop, waiting in the cold, fumbling with wallet and cash, enduring nausea-inducing vibrations, figuring out the right time to call for the right stop, walking again in the cold...) was simply not worth the saving. I was actually annoyed by how such a basic service could be so expensive for casual use... yeah, I know the answer: casuals actually subsidize regulars, who get discounted fares and RFID cards. But that raises the barrier to adoption, which is Bad.
    • eMSF 7y ago
      >walking to the stop, waiting in the cold, fumbling with wallet and cash, enduring nausea-inducing vibrations, figuring out the right time to call for the right stop, walking again in the cold... Wait: does the weather never get cold again if there's no fare, or are you actually implying that taking a bus isn't as comfortable as driving your own car, even if "transit" is done "right"? I could swear that's not the usual message to see in "transit" related HN threads. Anyway, I have to admit that were I asked how to reduce airport-related emissions, I might not have turned my eyes on employees cars first. Or perhaps even second.
• monksy 7y ago
  The amount of immaturity, and inexperience in carrying out this activism is incredibly irritating and insulting towards those who were subjected to it. In the article they claimed that they either tried to survey the employees and tried to influence their behavior. Problem I have with the survey: They're trying to collect data, but try to influence them at the same time towards an outcome that they're looking for. Additionally: They tried to push their policy about how they feel towards cars and completely ignored the needs and reasons why the people behaved as they did. It sounds like the wants of the "participants" of the change were in agreement. But it sounds like the implementation was a complete disaster. (Yet it never explains how they went from 100 participants to 3 in 3 months) They came up with excuses about why it was the employees fault for not changing how they wanted them to.
• esotericn 7y ago
  You don't convince people to commute differently. If that's your goal, you instead "convince them" to live in different places and work at different jobs. The commute follows from that. People don't 'choose' to get the train in to their office block in London. They use it because they deliberately chose their home and job within those constraints. If they live a few miles from the station, they might cycle or drive to the station and go from there. This is again dictated by their home situation, it's not a choice in the immediate sense. Next time I end up in London I'm thinking of renting a flat within walking (or 10 minute cycle) distance of wherever I end up working. The commute was essentially dictated when I made that decision. If I sign a 12 month lease or buy a place further out then I'd have decided a different commute for myself, at that time, for the next ~year.
• yohannparis 7y ago
  Great article. As I pointed out in another comment: End all subsidies to all transportation modes. Simple, all roads need tolls, all parking should reflect land values usage, end fuel and public transportation subsidies, taxes pollution. Then people will find the economical and ecological to travel.
• aga98mtl 7y ago
  I think the approach of blaming the individuals is wrong. It's society's fault that it is preferable to take your car. In places where there is successful public transit( NYC, Paris) you see high-density residential building within a walkable distance to a mass transit station. All the ground floors in the buildings around the station are retail business or offices. This makes it easy and convenient for people to use public transit and shop for food. Contrast this with your average american city where there is nothing interesting around mass transit within walking distance and very few residential options. To fix public transit in America we need to build high density residential building around existing stations with shops on the ground floor. Then it will be rational to use public transit.
• WalterBright 7y ago
  My commuting behavior was car only because every alternative took twice as long.
• Merrill 7y ago
  Having commuted by car and by train, I think train commuting is more stressful. First is the stress of getting ready on time, driving to the station, finding a parking spot and getting on board the right train. Second, arriving at the station and then making the connection to light rail (my case) or to subway or bus (your mileage may vary) and then walking to your destination. This compares unfavorably with leaving your garage and driving to the company parking lot. I have also carpooled. This is also a hassle depending on your regularity and the regularity of those in the carpool. Missing turns due to travel, sickness, vacations, etc. means setting up swaps with other drivers. It also is a hassle if you need to work late or get in early. Not all carpool members are agreeable. I once carpooled with a person who held conversations with people in the back seat - the problem was that he couldn't talk to them without looking back at them - fairly hair-raising.
  • pirocks 7y ago
    I realize that the entire world is not like London, but the idea of driving to a train, and trying to get a specific train is alien to me. If you want a train just take the first one to your destination? And why drive to the train when you can bus/cycle/walk? Where are you going to park your car anyway?
    • pmiller2 7y ago
      Because sometimes people need to get places at specific times. One obviously doesn’t want to be late, and, being very early can be a colossal waste of time. Taking the specific train that gets to the destination a little early (but not too early), or on time, solves that problem.
    • esotericn 7y ago
      Everything you have mentioned here happens to people who work in London. There are people who, say, live in Welwyn, or Dorking, or any number of commuter towns. They might drive to the station, park their car, and get a specific train in, because the next one is in half an hour.
    • Can_Not 7y ago
• jeena 7y ago
  I have luck, commuting by train takes exactly 1 hour door to door, 8 mins walking to and from the train. Train goe every 30 mins and I havr flexible hours. If I want to go by car it's at least 1,5 hours,longer during rush hour, for the 80km. And it's also much more expensive, especially parking in the city center.
• massysett 7y ago
  "First, employees didn’t have to bear the full financial cost of car commuting" They don't bear the full financial cost of transit commuting either, since transit is heavily subsidized. Here is where someone will say "but roads are subsidized." Of course they are. However, those who drive their own vehicles bear the full cost of the capital asset they use (that is, the car). Transit systems recover only a portion of their operating cost - and NONE of their capital cost - from fares. Despite the big operating cost, capital cost, and opportunity cost of driving (that is, while driving one has to drive, but while commuting on transit, someone can sometimes do something else like read) people still like to drive. The reason is that for many people driving is a far superior mode of transportation. You couldn't pay them to take transit.
• munificent 7y ago
  For the past seven years, I've lived 1.6 miles from work. My route to work almost perfectly follows a bike trail. Despite that, I drove almost every single day. Largely because it meant another ten minutes of free time in the morning, and getting home a little earlier every evening. Then where I work enacted a plan where we pay any day that we park at the office, and get a bonus any day we take alternate transit. The plan is designed to be revenue neutral for the company while incentivizing people to not drive and park. I bike every single day now. In fact, I'd probably keep biking if they stopped the plan because I'm used to it now and really like it. But it was so hard to change my commuting habit. I feel like the drive to work is a point in the day where humans have absolute minimal executive function and willpower. By the time I'm heading out the door, I don't want to be thinking strategically or trying to make the world better or anything. I just want to get the fuck to work and use my brainpower there.
  • jdavis703 7y ago
    I’m glad you’re enjoying your switch! It seems like 1.6 miles at a moderate pace is a 6 minute ride though... Of course I’m assuming no hills and a lack of extreme heat which might be wrong on my end.
    • munificent 7y ago
      It's completely flat and weather here in Seattle is cool. It's really an optimal environment for riding. It takes me about ten minutes with another five to park. I could push faster, but (1) I have a pretty cheap bike and (2) I don't want to get to the office sweaty. For comparison, my drive was about six minutes.
    • CydeWeys 7y ago
      6 minutes is a pretty optimistic estimate for that length of commute. It's only 6 minutes if there's no lights whatsoever and you pedal decently fast. My 3 km bike commute averages 11 minutes on account of all the lights and traffic congestion :/ bike commute
      • 7y ago
• jdavis703 7y ago
  I commute 80 miles every day by a combination of train and bike. When I get into my suburban office I have to lock my bike up in the far end of the parking garage. It’s the part that’s always empty, or has someone paranoid about their car getting scratched. There’s really easy things we could be doing to encourage sustainable transportation, like putting the bike racks near the front door.
• boyadjian 7y ago
  Very good article. I presently live at less than one kilometer from my job, so I go by feet to work in a quarter. And guess what ? I have never been so productive. When I arrive at work in the morning, I am not stressed. When I go back home in the afternoon, I have time do personal projects at home. The strikes of the Paris region ? Not my problem ! I am ready for the big collapse.
• dredmorbius 7y ago
  After the global climate, and before adolescent social habits, the biggest impact of the automobile has been on built environments. A frequent auto-apologist has again reiterated in this thread that alternative commuting, particularly by bicycle, simply doesn't work for most Americans simply on account of the geography of most American cities. Where do you think that geography came from?!!! When "transport" meant "walking", or for the very lucky, horse-drawn, or beginning around the 1880s, electrically-powered street-cars, cities were a mile or so across -- about the distance a person could walk in 20-30 minutes. With 30 minutes of expressway travel now being about 30 miles, you end up with cities 30-60 miles across, particularly if they co-evolved with the automobile. This is no accident. Activities and services which might have been co-located, or closely-located, aren't: housing, work, factories, offices, schools, parks, shopping, entertainment. I've commuted, variously, by bicycle, boat, bus, train, and far more often then I'd care to admit, by car. When living in cities with post-1930s layouts, the latter is virtually almost necessary. Even in cities whose downtown cores were laid out in the 19th century, late-20th and early-21st century patterns prefer offices, shops, and other activities spread widely across the landscape, with poor bike accessibility. The best cycling options have been relatively compact, fairly flat, and dense areas (with a few exceptions). Under such circumstances, and with cycling highly encouraged by design, cycling is not only possibly but vastly the suprior option. Transit-based commuting is an option where high densities and high service levels support it. Even then, there are very few US urban regions in which this is truly an option, and there, most usually only within the urban core. New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston make up most of those. An allergy to density, aversion to new construction, a preference for sprawl, racist legacies concerning both land-use and transit, and grossly misguided attempts to inflate real estate assets rather than maximise regional and national common weal, are other factors with large contributions to this problem. Mail-based commuter incentives are like trying to ignite a bonfire in an iceberg. The conditions are absolutely inimicable to the goals.
• Forge36 7y ago
  The bus route near me is a 15 minute walk, the bus comes once an hour. When I lived downtown it was 30 minutes, then an hour long commute. Driving today takes me 12 minutes, 16 if I time it poorly with the rush. By bike is 30 minutes and I typically do it for a week once a year (I didn't this year as I carpooled). Once I'm there I need to shower, however I cannot leave anything (no lockers).
• 2ion 7y ago
  Because I need to isolate myself from a crowd that goes on public transport sick, coughes down my neck and sneezes into my face, doesn't wash properly and doesn't have train manners (NO phone calls, NO food, NO party, NO litter, NO loud conversations, NO music I can hear from your cans). If I don't protect myself, I'll get sick and irritated. Public transport is dirty and littered. On metros here, there is no 1st class coach I could pay for to get some distance, quiet and respectable company. So the personal car it is. Unless you fix people, I will use all my privilege to keep myself comfortable.
  • youeseh 7y ago
    I find the concept of a morgue on rails (no phone calls, no "loud" conversations...) pretty amazing. How'd we arrive to the point where we expect people to not be social in public places?
    • choeger 7y ago
      By letting people behave antisocial. In public transport, you cannot tell the noisy stranger to lower their volume because you risk being punched or worse. What is considered normal behavior in a typical subway is not considered acceptable where I grew up.
      • shortandsweet 7y ago
        Well I guess you didn't grow up near the subway. It's a lot better now than it was.
    • baddox 7y ago
      A morgue is your best example of a place where people are expected to be respectful of other people in their close proximity? And yes, the fact that you’re in public and necessarily in very close proximity to other people is precisely why you would hope that people would be respectful.
  • smileysteve 7y ago
    There is some research that there is an immune boost to regular public transit riders. Evidence points to regular riders getting less sick than occasional riders, and that can extrapolate to occasional public interaction. > Seasoned public transportation commuters, though, seem to be better protected against the viruses. “These data are very plausible when we think about the greater likelihood of developing protective antibodies to common respiratory viruses if repeatedly exposed,” https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/news/20110120/catch-bus-catch-cold https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/news/20110120/catch-bus-c...
• uberduber 7y ago
  I'm surprised no one has mentioned the electric scooter rental services. For a while they did make traffic in Santa Monica and surrounding areas better. It went from horrific to less horrific but no one talked about that. My boyfriend works 1 mile from work and he took them almost everyday in the beginning. When the cities all cracked down and required a licensing fee for each one, the numbers were drastically reduced and they were no longer consistently available within a 2-3 minute walk. So back in the car he went. We've looked into buying one but right now they're too expensive, heavy, and unreliable to own. It's so much easier to just leave it when you arrive and not worry about maintenance.
  • rvanlaar 7y ago
    I'm genuinely curious, but why: - not get a (electric) bike? - not walk?
    • uberduber 7y ago
      An electric bike is too heavy and bulky, there's nowhere to store it in the house. Also a pain to store in the office which is upstairs. We can't leave it outside due to the homeless, they'll steal or vandalize or defecate on it. There's a bunch of reasons, but mostly he just really hates walking. It's boring, too slow and too hot outside much of the year which causes the whole sweatiness problem.
• choeger 7y ago
  So the solution is to not offer parking space for employees? I wonder how the author came to the conclusion that a parking lot costs "1000nds of $/a" for an airport. Space is essentially the main requirement for that business, so I wonder what the tarmac costs. And even if this was true, did not one consider that this might already be part of hiring people? "Look, we cannot offer you that many vacation days, but you'll get free parking, so you'll save half an hour every day in commute."
• Proven 7y ago
  In fact it's so hard that statists "have no choice" but to get this done by applying coercion either through regulations or taxation.
• gok 7y ago
  I'm surprised how little is written about employer-operated mass transit. The shuttles that Google, Apple etc run in the SFBA are great.
  • zootam 7y ago
    does this actually count as mass transit? i am not surprised its hardly mentioned, as it is only useful to a tiny percentage of the population of 1 region. as a case study, it boils down to being a nice benefit of working at one of a select few large, highly successful companies. can this service be replicated effectively anywhere else? by anyone else? even by the same company in a different region? my initial answer to all of the above questions is no.
    • gok 7y ago
      Yes, for example, Amazon and Microsoft have replicated the service in Seattle. Austin employers like Cirrus Logic run shuttles. I only bring it up because the original article is explicitly about how an employer can encourage employees to stop driving to work.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• arkades 7y ago
  Oddly, the article seemed to overlook the most obvious elements of why it’s hard to shift that behavior: Driving around picking people up consumes precious morning time. In exchange, one sacrifices their bespoke commuting routine. That is, instead of getting to work in 40 minutes of listening to RPG podcasts with the window open in winter, I get there in an hour and fifteen while engaging in small talk and compromising on climate control. People don’t just forego carpooling because the costs Of driving are externalized; they forego carpooling because carpooling carries significant personal costs. Is there a reason these analysts couldn’t bother to include the element of “people don’t carpool because it sucks”?
  • hcurtiss 7y ago
    Carpooling is also difficult for those who have irregular work schedules. Many people cannot leave at the same time every day. That also makes mass transit difficult. If your schedule doesn’t line up with the bus or train, it adds significant time while you wait for the next.
• rurcliped 7y ago
  When thinking about whether a company is environmentally responsible, I'd look for something like "We have regular independent audits of our business processes to ensure that any job that can be performed from home effectively is always performed from home. We regularly assess each manager's ability to lead remote teams, and address all deficiencies, even if this means terminating employment."
• AtlasBarfed 7y ago
  I tried to read this article but it is tone deaf, infantile, and moronic. And I'm a very ardent environmentalist. Fundamentally it blames the victim. Carpooling won't work because even if people go to work at the same time (by some miracle no one is sidetracked in the process), getting home is even more unreliable given different workloads, so someone might get stranded. What to do then if you're in the burbs? Eat a 100$ taxi that might be a significant chunk of the take home pay they earned that day? Take an even longer time on things like busses that they haven't navigated before? Biking is great until there is rain, snow, cold, and it exposes the rider to a far greater risk of catastrophic injury, and the downside of getting a flat is a lot worse than in a car since changing the innertube is often about a 50% chance of actually solving the problem if there are splinters or a bad outertube. As for the victim blaming, companies should be obligated to providing comprehensive transit networks, or contribute to the existing transit networks. If the company is the usual adult daycare cubefarm office junk, then a company should be obligated to providing telecommuting options for parttime at least, and several office centers (especially in downtowns near transit nexuses). Yes Americans suck. But they also are overworked, underserved by infrastructure, and given little options by businesses and governments.
  • legulere 7y ago
    The points you mention against biking to work in my opinion as someone that bikes to work don’t hold. The only problems are too big distances and cultural acceptance which would also lead to more infrastructure like showers at work.
    • aidenn0 7y ago
      The people driving to work can't get showers installed, so I think gp's point holds.
    • heretoo 7y ago
      Living in Melbourne, Australia, the real risk of catastrophic injury keeps me from cycling. The chance of being "doored" is very real, and the likelyhood of getting hit by a moving car is also very real. Most of my colleagues that cycle have been involved in these accidents. The city has bike lanes, which suddenly disappear, or require crossing moving traffic, just to go straight ahead, because the bike lane has now moved one car lane to the right. Along with a lack of training of drivers with regards to sharing the road with bikes, I wouldn't ever recommend that someone cycles in this city, even though many do. It would need the concerted effort from the entire population, similar to the Dutch population in the 70's or whenever they changed their bike road rules. See: https://www.vicroads.vic.gov.au/safety-and-road-rules/cyclist-safety/car-doors-and-bike-riders https://www.vicroads.vic.gov.au/safety-and-road-rules/cyclis... It mentions 771 "doorings" over a 5 year period. The number is probably much higher, since many wouldn't get reported.
• pledess 7y ago
  Strong incentives against SOV employees can be a subtle form of discrimination. For example, age discrimination: a person raising their family in the suburbs (where Single Occupancy Vehicle may be the only option) is likely to be older than your average new hire. Also, unfortunately, not all categories of persons feel equally safe on public transportation. In many parts of the country, saying that your company is concerned about commuting behavior is like saying "unmarried white males are a great fit here."
• nitwit005 7y ago
  > But how can organizations encourage their employees to commute differently? Instead of expecting the employees to fix things themselves, why not hire some busses and pick the employees up? It is expensive to do so, but nicer commutes often correlate strongly with lower turnover. There is a reason Facebook, Google, and the like pay for it.
• ummonk 7y ago
  Carpooling takes significantly longer than driving individually, due to the need to coordinate trips. Likewise, using public transportation usually takes significantly longer than driving. I don't think charging employees for parking would change their behaviors (it certainly didn't change mine when I had to pay for my own parking spot in SF for $300 a month - I still found it beneficial to save an hour each day in commuting by driving instead of taking the train). Outside of highly built up areas (where things are within walking distance or it is economically feasible to have fast frequent public transportation between high density housing and high density office space), driving is simply a better option.
• bartread 7y ago
  I used to mostly cycle to work when I only lived a couple of miles from the office. Nowadays I mostly motorcycle or occasionally drive the 11-ish miles. Door to door it generally takes 20 - 25 minutes for the former, and 30 for the latter if you pick your time. Taking the bus is at least an hour even if it's on time because it has so many stops and involves walks at both ends. I just don't have that kind of time to waste. It also doesn't run late into the evening and, which makes it next to impossible to work late when I need to, or to do anything after work. It's too dangerous to cycle. So, no, unless and until better alternatives are available I won't be changing the way I commute.
  • specialist 7y ago
    In your area, is motorcycling safer than bicycling? I ask because I'm curious about the electric bikes, and maybe mopeds. Does keeping up with the flow of traffic improve safety? Being louder? Just the bulk of the motorcycle? Proper gear (eg helmet, armored clothes)?
    • bartread 7y ago
      Yeah, definitely. I mean, in town cycling is mostly fine because there are cycle paths all over the place. There are also cycle routes running out of town for a few miles, sometimes further depending on where you are. The problem where I live is that there is no dedicated cycle route so I'm sharing a two lane A-road that's potholed to fsck, with heavy traffic in both directions, plenty of commercial and agricultural traffic, and everybody trying to pass you. Worse, when traffic is lighter it turns into the kind of road where quite a few people want to hoon along it at 80mph. The motorcycle wins here primarily because you can always keep up with the flow of traffic so you're not going to get side-swiped by an articulated lorry or farm tractor towing a trailer of turnips as it tries to pass you. And you're not going to get killed because you hit a pothole at the side of the road, fell off your bike and got run over.
• LeroyJenkins 7y ago
  Bus is the lowest form of commute. Specially in winter, when most of population is infected with highly contagious diseases. The best one,and hardest to maintain is bike: shower requirementbat work, various weather conditions.
• silasdb 7y ago
  I don't know how it works in other parts of the world, but where I live (Brazil) people afford cars to avoid bad quality public transportation (packed and expensive buses and trains). Not to say alternative modes have zero incentive from both government and companies. But I also see another reason: having a car gives you status. Many of my colleagues live very near from work (20, 15 or even 10 minutes walking) but they insist going to work using their cars because they don't see someone on their position could be seen arriving by foot or sharing public transportation with ordinary workers...
• kazinator 7y ago
  It's hard to change people's commuting behavior because they've explored the options and optimized it according to their priorities. Its hard to convince people to "de-optimize" once they believe they have optimized. For instance, they would rather sit through traffic for forty minutes, then be on some combination of buses and trains for eighty minutes, because time is an important optimization parameter. A bicycle might get them there in thirty minutes, but it's not for everyone, and particularly not for everyone in all weather. Effort and comfort are optimization parameters for many people. Traffic and tense situations have their stress, but so does waiting for some bus, and being passed by when it comes because it is too full to pick up any more passengers. Cycling is dangerous, and tense situations that can occur when cycling in traffic are way more nerve-frazzling than ones that occur in driving, on a more regular basis.
• citizenpaul 7y ago
  I'd imagine that already being bought into a car is part of the problem. If you already own a car you have significant monetary investment that you will never get back. Double so if you car is in well maintained order. At the very least you probably have 6 months of car insurance that you will be stuck paying. Now you are looking at minimum 6 months return on your commute before you even start saving money. Basically you are taking on a huge probably year long inconvenience for a small cost savings that won't even start showing up until the first year is over. Meanwhile you have that car is sitting around beckoning you to go back to its convenience. Perhaps if insurance companies would get on board full it could help along with some sort of broker service to help quickly offload the car would help.
• perl4ever 7y ago
  You want less of something, tax it. Trains, buses, bicycles, etc. are not or should not be goals in themselves. Using fossil fuel for manufacturing and not vehicle fuel is not the goal in itself. Less CO2 (or other pollution/resource use) is the goal, so tax all fossil fuel and let markets figure out what is efficient. And if you think expensive gas is harsh on the poor, address that separately a la basic income proposals. This all is quite impractical, so people will just go on searching for the keys they dropped in the sewer under the lamppost where they can see.
• ckrailo 7y ago
  This is why, when possible, it's best to push the cost and timing of commuting onto the person or company requiring the commute. Some professions classify commuting time as working time, but not all (nor is there a legal requirement for it). For a lot of companies, there's really no need for long-term fixed colocation, but the economy allows for it since they don't have to account for most of the externalities and 3rd+ degree costs associated with new buildings in ecosystems, construction long-term impacts, or even something as simple for the carbon output of making concrete, all the while reaping the rewards of employees working extra for free in a tightly-controlled environment. And when they inevitably move, there's no legal requirement to pay employees for relocation either. Additional corporate costs anywhere in this ecosystem would probably result in dramatic changes and even more work-from-home opportunities. Innovative remote-first companies are using the savings to only temporarily colocate their employees in interesting and rewarding ways for all (like all-hands meetups), plus reaping the benefits of naturally-increased written communications, creating a win-win situation for all from what I can tell. Put another way... the logistics/efficiencies/costs of everything is very different for those involved when individuals have to transport groceries to home (via cars, public transit, assistants, etc) vs a company like Amazon that connects warehousing, grocers, and delivery. Big box stores full of employees without a shred of product knowledge make less sense if people are no longer commuting by personal transport for basic goods because it's cheaper and easier to tap into a delivery network for the same thing. The years when oil was super expensive, economists noted how much less people were shopping (before online shopping was ubiquitous). It's already been uneconomical for a while now for most businesses to host the same bits their employees flip and/or related software in the same place as the employees (doesn't matter if you're writing software or ticking order-completed boxes after attaching printed shipping labels). The world is inherently more decentralized today than decades prior.