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Any reduction in commute time due to new infrastructure, capacity increases, new technology, or other improvements, always proves temporary, as average commute

by cs702 7y ago

Any reduction in commute time due to new infrastructure, capacity increases, new technology, or other improvements, always proves temporary, as average commute times in large population centers gradually converge to Marchetti's Constant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti's_constant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti's_constant In the words of Bertrand Russell: "Each improvement in locomotion has increased the area over which people are compelled to move: so that a person who would have had to spend half an hour to walk to work a century ago must still spend half an hour to reach his destination, because the contrivance that would have enabled him to save time had he remained in his original situation now -- by driving him to a more distant residential area -- effectually cancels out the gain."[a] See also: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/08/commute-time-city-size-transportation-urban-planning-history/597055/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/08/commute-time-... [a] As quoted on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti's_constant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti's_constant

helen___keller 7y ago
Another way of looking at it, building transit doesn't get anybody to work faster, but it does allow you to scale population density, which in turn allows you to build more housing for a region that may be in a housing crunch. If you can imagine that one day the world woke up, and some god replaced every building in LA with a skyscraper and every parking lot or driveway with a multi-story parking garage, you could use Marchetti's constant to predict what happens next: People move closer to work to reduce their commute, then the roads in the inner city get more and more congested, and the effective size of the city shrinks to fit the "1 hour commute" rule as it's now impossible to live in what are currently middle and outer neighborhoods, as their commutes would far exceed 1 hour. Adding more transit allows us to grow the effective size of the city even if every building in the city is a skyscraper. On a smaller scale, this is basically Manhattan, after all.
carapace 7y ago
One of the wild things in Smil's "Energy and Civilization, a History" is that cars generally don't do better than walking if you factor in the hours spent working to pay for the expenses of owning and operating the car. Your total miles travelled per hour spent is roughly the same!

by cs702 7y ago

helen___keller 7y ago

Another way of looking at it, building transit doesn't get anybody to work faster, but it does allow you to scale population density, which in turn allows you to build more housing for a region that may be in a housing crunch. If you can imagine that one day the world woke up, and some god replaced every building in LA with a skyscraper and every parking lot or driveway with a multi-story parking garage, you could use Marchetti's constant to predict what happens next: People move closer to work to reduce their commute, then the roads in the inner city get more and more congested, and the effective size of the city shrinks to fit the "1 hour commute" rule as it's now impossible to live in what are currently middle and outer neighborhoods, as their commutes would far exceed 1 hour. Adding more transit allows us to grow the effective size of the city even if every building in the city is a skyscraper. On a smaller scale, this is basically Manhattan, after all.

carapace 7y ago

One of the wild things in Smil's "Energy and Civilization, a History" is that cars generally don't do better than walking if you factor in the hours spent working to pay for the expenses of owning and operating the car. Your total miles travelled per hour spent is roughly the same!