Thirty Minutes, Give or Take

Commuting time grabs our interest, now and again. Arguments about crumbling infrastructure often devolve down to increased time getting to work. When highway efficiency was at its peak decades ago, there was a rather substantial movement away from the inner city out to suburbia. The inner city went into steep decline, splendid new malls and housing tracts exploded in rings around major urban centers. Corporate satellites followed and companies left expensive high rises in big cities, joining “white flight” into the ‘burbs.

But that was then. The roads are in a pretty nasty state now. Today’s young work force – dealing with bad roads and expensive car-related costs – started a reverse migration back to the center-city. Zs and Ys began seeking housing nearer their workplace… assuming they were even able to leave the parental nest. As technology upgraded the need for space – think about on-demand and storage in the clouds versus shelves of video tapes, CDs and DVDs – homes moved to multifunctional “open space” versus many rooms for those same purposes. Online shopping and upscale urban malls rose just as suburban malls have fallen into decay and obsolescence. Big cities amenities and entertainment were additional reasons to move into the newly re-gentrified inner city.

Ride sharing and upgraded public transportation replaced the need for “my own car” among these urban dwellers. Even walking to work! Driving-age young drivers, even in such car-centric cities like Los Angeles, were getting fewer and fewer driver’s licenses. Their digital world, from smart phones to tablets, were state of the art, but cars were no longer the “American teenaged dream” obsession of yesteryear. Expensive and unnecessary luxuries.

Enter Elon Musk, promising to revolutionize intercity travel times with his legendary Hyperloop (pictured above). Travel times between Los Angeles and San Francisco, Washington D.C. to New York City, etc. would consume under half an hour. Wow! You could live in Portland, Oregon and commute to Seattle, Washington. What a time-saver! What an opening up of housing choices! Except for one strange reality: throughout most of recorded history, there has been a general urban trend for commute times, from home to work, to be about half an hour.

“The half-hour trip is something of a mystical notion in transportation. These [Musk] visions of the future sound seductive in part because half an hour is, in fact, roughly how long many of us spend getting to work. The typical American commutes 26.4 minutes, one way, according to the American Community Survey. Even in metro New York, with nearly the longest commutes in the country, that average is 36 minutes.

“Of course plenty of workers trek less or much more, but average American commute times have budged only modestly over the last 35 years, since the census began asking about them. International studies have shown similar half-hour patterns. History even hints that the Romans traveled about the same, when most people went everywhere on foot…

“‘What Musk correctly realizes is that there will be a huge market with maglev or hyperloop technology for the places it connects in 30 minutes,’ said Jesse Ausubel, an environmental scientist at the Rockefeller University. ‘Any pairing that you can fit into that more or less one-hour round trip, the traffic will multiply immensely,’ he said, referring to the volume of travelers.

“People priced out of Brooklyn could move to Baltimore. Congressional aides would commute to Philadelphia. Whole cities — and labor and housing markets — would fuse together…

“The law of the 30-minute commute is known as Marchetti’s constant, named for the Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti, a mentor to Mr. Ausubel. Mr. Marchetti picked up the work of Yacov Zahavi, a transportation engineer who theorized in the 1970s and ’80s that people have a fixed travel-time budget. We allocate part of our day to getting around. And that amount, about an hour, Mr. Zahavi argued, holds steady no matter where we live or how we travel.

“Mr. Marchetti noted supporting historical clues: Ancient Rome, Persepolis and Marrakesh were about five kilometers across, or the maximum distance most people can travel in an hour on foot. He diagramed the growth of Berlin, which appeared to expand concentrically as transportation advances enlarged the land people could cover. He found it not coincidental that modern-day prisons still allow inmates one humane concession — the freedom to pace for an hour outdoors.

“‘From our anthropological point of view, humans are territorial animals,’ said Mr. Ausubel, who wrote numerous papers with Mr. Marchetti on the topic. ‘So they seek to maximize range, which equates with resources. And those resources can be jobs or education, or fields for rice or wheat, or social life.’… We’re hard-wired to roam farther, they argue, when more speed allows us to. (By this same theory, delays in the New York subway disturb something deeply embedded in the human mind.)” New York Times, August 10^th. Much of this may also depend on the cost of those 200 mile zooms, but sooner or later…  Oh, then there is the additional commute needed once you arrive at your city destination.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I suspect that no matter what happens in improvements in urban transportation technology, that magical 30-minutes-each-way commute time will not change much.