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Great Divide in How Americans Commute to Work

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Re: Great Divide in How Americans Commute to Work

#31

Post by curtis »

> We are cleaving into two nations—one where daily life revolves around the car, and the other where the car is receding in favor of walking, biking, and transit.

Walking, biking, and transit are not actually the same thing, except that they are "not driving". So it's more accurate to say that there are two kinds of commuters, those that take cars and those that don't. There's absolutely nothing new about this though. It's likely true that more people are not driving these days, but that's got more to do with the fact that more of us are living in large cities where it's simply not possible for everyone to drive, and where transit is more practical because of the density.

This notion that at some point in the future there will not be people commuting in cars is just dumb, and kind of tiresome. There's a lot of noise being generated by people who think driving a car is flat out immoral, and I'd contend this isn't a moral issue it's just a practical one, and I really wish it were treated this way.

Re: Great Divide in How Americans Commute to Work

#32

Post by esotericn »

sandworm101 wrote: post #7

>> "a smaller-than-average share of workers drives to work alone in more compact college towns" We all talk about trying to get people our of their cars, but imho isn't all about cities or even transport systems. Imho it is about jobs. The great divide is between those who work in places that support alternative to private vehicles and those that do not. If your employer wants you to work changing hours on short noti…

I don't see how that's about jobs - that's an artifact of a bad public transport system.

In London I could drive or get public transport. Depending on where I go, one could be faster or slower. Generally, for non-radial journeys further out, driving will be faster.

But in terms of reliability/variance the public transport option will almost always be better for journeys of longer than ten minutes or so.

Buses have bus lanes - aside from the small delay of people getting on or off, they strictly cannot suffer more variance than a car because they have priority over cars for some subsection of the route.

Trains... well, trains run on tracks. There are service interruptions, sure, but those are far less frequent than traffic jams or accidents on the road or whatever.

(I'm talking here about all journeys. Commuting, not commuting, whatever.)

The stereotypical rural (or bad city urban) bus that comes every 20-30 minutes with no real adherence to any timetable, no live arrivals information or anything else sours people on public transport.

Re: Great Divide in How Americans Commute to Work

#33

Post by chabons »

closeparen wrote: post #12

Warning: speculation. Suppose that a city’s value and economy descend in large part from connectivity. A transit system is extremely useful at a few very specific points, but your connectedness drops off sharply as you get even a few blocks away from it, due to the extreme inefficiency of walking or (worse) waiting for a connecting bus. A road network’s utility is broad and diffuse, with gentle gradients of utility f…

The phenomenon you're describing gives rise to the last mile transport problem, which is notoriously hard to solve. You either want something which is compact enough to fit on existing transit systems or exists in a sufficient quantity at transit nodes to augment human mobility and smooth out the gradients between transit nodes. I'm hoping that as battery and motor technology advance we'll be able to miniaturize personal transit technology enough to make such devices ubiquitous.

Re: Great Divide in How Americans Commute to Work

#35

Post by benj111 »

closeparen wrote: post #12

Warning: speculation. Suppose that a city’s value and economy descend in large part from connectivity. A transit system is extremely useful at a few very specific points, but your connectedness drops off sharply as you get even a few blocks away from it, due to the extreme inefficiency of walking or (worse) waiting for a connecting bus. A road network’s utility is broad and diffuse, with gentle gradients of utility f…

That makes sense.

Cities are basically gathering places. Shops, jobs, accommodation all gather there in a self reinforcing manner.

It follows that transport connections would influence that.

Re: Great Divide in How Americans Commute to Work

#36

Post by rst »

bloomca wrote: post #27

I don't think there is such a great divide. The greater divide is between people who own a car (or cars) and who do not, however, seems for USA it is a divide between New York City and the rest of the country. Also, I can comment on one thing I personally enjoy a lot – walking. I lived in many European cities, and recently moved to USA, so I can comment on it. To be able to walk, you need to live close enough to your…

It's not just New York; there are a few other urban areas with significant numbers of commuters by transit -- Boston and San Francisco (with the crowd traveling on the "Google buses", and the number of tech jobs downtown) both come to mind. But there are lots of cities (Los Angeles most notoriously) where a car-free life is nearly impossible.

Re: Great Divide in How Americans Commute to Work

#37

Post by the_gastropod »

perennate wrote: post #23
closeparen wrote: post #12

Warning: speculation. Suppose that a city’s value and economy descend in large part from connectivity. A transit system is extremely useful at a few very specific points, but your connectedness drops off sharply as you get even a few blocks away from it, due to the extreme inefficiency of walking or (worse) waiting for a connecting bus. A road network’s utility is broad and diffuse, with gentle gradients of utility f…

Doesn't a transit system complement a road network? Rapid transit serves the most trips when either the source or destination (or both) are in the urban center. The road network is typically most congested in the urban center. Thus, transit reduces congestion in the areas that would otherwise be most congested, making the road network more useful. Perhaps "car-oriented cities" simply haven't yet reached the density (…

This is kind of a chicken-egg situation. You can't reach the high-density requirement when cars are the primary means of transportation. Cars are an extraordinarily low-density means of transportation. And some evidence, based on city age, seems to suggest that cities built with cars in mind (e.g., non-east coast cities in the U.S.) tend to sprawl quite a bit.

Re: Great Divide in How Americans Commute to Work

#38

Post by TuringNYC »

the_gastropod wrote: post #25
francisofascii wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironic that the people making more money walk, (which historically has been what poor people do). And the current poorer people use a privately owned transport vehicle. That would not be common sense to an American living more than 100 years ago. :)

It's not common sense today either. I don't think many people actually understand how expensive driving a car is. These expenses are both individual (maintenance, gas, insurance, tolls, tickets, etc.) and societal (greenhouse gas emissions, crashes, infrastructure like roads, bridges, and interstate exchanges, inefficient land use from parking, etc.) I'm confident in the future we'll look back at how most Americans l…

There is another "expense" in driving cars - having to expend mental load on driving and not being able to focus 100% on something else during commute time.

Exactly one year ago, we tried an experiment and moved to Arlington VA, just outside Washington DC. We live ~5km from my office and i switch it up between walking, metro, and cycling with a big bias towards walking. Door-to-door, 95% of the route is dedicated trail so there is no mental load of avoiding traffic. I churn thru audiobooks, catch-up conversations with friends, and sometimes just plain uninterrupted thinking. This is the best gift given i've given myself for a long, long time. Summertime walks are so pleasurable that I look forward to going to work early in the day and coming back just as the sun subsides.

This is all awesome enough that I'm dreading the next job in SF/SV/NYC just because of commute alone.

If you are curious, this is the typical (non-winter) walk: https://www.instagram.com/p/BhCXV4eDvSZ/?utm_source=ig_web_c...

Re: Great Divide in How Americans Commute to Work

#39

Post by ghaff »

jermaustin1 wrote: post #11
alchemism wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mass transit systems outside of NYC proper are designed to feed people in and out of the city core in two large waves, and [are] not designed to move people around the larger urbanized region (the "Tri-State area") outside of those two waves. So for the large majority of residents, a car will still be a necessity. Even Manhattanites will eventually feel the need buy/rent a car so they can do things like go to a f…

When I lived in Manhattan, I used ZipCar regularly. It was provided free as a "benefit" by my employer. If I had to pay for it or monthly parking or anything like that, I would have just stayed in town.

In my experience a lot of people only find Manhattan tolerable because they can get out of the city on a regular basis. Assumes a certain income level of course. But those I know who live in Manhattan, SF, etc. without cars rent Zipcar and conventional rentals a lot. As well as Uber, etc.

Many people are just largely stuck to public transit lines of course. But the demographic that is actually moving into cities (college educated professionals) mostly doesn’t think that way.

Re: Great Divide in How Americans Commute to Work

#40

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

chabons wrote: post #33
closeparen wrote: post #12

Warning: speculation. Suppose that a city’s value and economy descend in large part from connectivity. A transit system is extremely useful at a few very specific points, but your connectedness drops off sharply as you get even a few blocks away from it, due to the extreme inefficiency of walking or (worse) waiting for a connecting bus. A road network’s utility is broad and diffuse, with gentle gradients of utility f…

The phenomenon you're describing gives rise to the last mile transport problem, which is notoriously hard to solve. You either want something which is compact enough to fit on existing transit systems or exists in a sufficient quantity at transit nodes to augment human mobility and smooth out the gradients between transit nodes. I'm hoping that as battery and motor technology advance we'll be able to miniaturize pers…

> miniaturize personal transit technology

This was the segway model.

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