{"id":2289,"date":"2008-02-22T08:36:13","date_gmt":"2008-02-22T08:36:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/02\/22\/halfremembered-factoids-of-sci\/"},"modified":"2008-02-22T08:36:13","modified_gmt":"2008-02-22T08:36:13","slug":"halfremembered-factoids-of-sci","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/02\/22\/halfremembered-factoids-of-sci\/","title":{"rendered":"Half-Remembered Factoids of Science: Transportation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at Arcane Gazebo, Travis talks about commuting<\/a>, based on an Ezra Klein post<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Longtime readers know my obsession with the way we overvalue positional goods like money, prestige, and real estate and undervalue non-positional goods like social connections, walking to work, and health. But the evidence really is clear that you need to make a whole dump truck of money to outweigh the happiness offered by being only a 15 minute stroll from the office, and that that extra room for your old guitars isn’t going to make you nearly as ecstatic as you think it will.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Lo these many years ago, I saw a talk at NIST by a transportation expert. His main purpose was to promote the idea of high-speed maglev trains (and he wasn’t terribly convincing on that count), but he opened with an interesting observation, that he claimed was backed up by science: He said that if you look back over the last hundred-odd years, the duration of the average “commute” to work has been more or less constant, at something like forty-five minutes (I don’t recall if that was one way or both ways).<\/p>\n

His claim was that a long time ago, people had to walk or ride horses everywhere, and thus lived very close to where they worked, whether that was a local farm or a factory. As transportation options improved (cars, trains, buses), people moved farther away from their place of work, because they could live farther away and still get there in the same amount of time.<\/p>\n

It’s an interesting claim. I have no idea how you would go about substantiating it. It would also seem to contradict the source that Ezra cites (which eventually traces to a Business Week article<\/a>) claiming that non-commuters are happier with their lives than commuters. Of course, I’m not sure how you’d go about substantiating that<\/strong> claim, either, at least not in a way that I would really trust…<\/p>\n

Anyway, I thought I would throw that out there, and see if anybody recognizes the claim about commuting times. I don’t remember the name of the speaker or where he said his information came from, but if anybody knows more about it, I’d love to have a source.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at Arcane Gazebo, Travis talks about commuting, based on an Ezra Klein post: Longtime readers know my obsession with the way we overvalue positional goods like money, prestige, and real estate and undervalue non-positional goods like social connections, walking to work, and health. But the evidence really is clear that you need to make… Continue reading Half-Remembered Factoids of Science: Transportation<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2289\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}