Do Commuters Have Souls?
Submitted by Ethan Arpi on April 12, 2007One Comment
Illustration from The New Yorker.
This week’s edition of the New Yorker includes a splendid piece on The Soul of the Commuter. Why, the article asks, do American’s subject themselves to painstakingly long commutes, even when these commutes aren’t in their best interest? “People may endure miserable commutes out of an inability to weigh their general well-being against quantifiable material gains.”
For those of you whose commute is too short to read the entire article, here are some of its highlights:
- For its fiftieth anniversary, Midas gave an award to America’s longest commuter, a software engineer who travels 372 miles a day, from the Sierra foothills to San Jose and back.
- The number of commuters who travel 90 minutes or more each way has nearly doubled since 1990, reaching 3.5 million.
- Americans average a commute of fifty-one minutes a day.
- Residents of Bangkok average a grueling two hours (standard for the “automobile-plagued Asian mega-capitals”.)
- 9 out of 10 travel to work by car.
- 88% of those drive alone.
[...] Are there solutions to problems like Amalia’s and Marc’s? Well, yes. First, better design of cities would allow workers to live closer to their jobs. Second, better mass transport systems would free up traffic and allow commuters to move more efficiently throughout cities. And third, people need to start making better like-style choices. Marc, for example, has deliberately chosen to live 100 miles from his office. Why would he make such a choice? As Nick Paumgarten of the New Yorker writes, “People may endure miserable commutes out of an inability to weigh their general well-being against quantifiable material gains.” This logic might not apply to Amalia, whose economic prospects are more grim, but it certainly applies to Marc. Filed under: Sustainable Transport, Mexico City, CTS Mexico, Social Impact, Urban Planning, United States, Mexico — Ethan Arpi @ 9:03 am [...]