It is sad to see that the notion of “excessive commutes” is still around. This is the idea that, if we all lived close to our work, we could drive less and all be happier.
The Antiplanner tried to demolish this myth fourteen years ago in The Vanishing Automobile, but now Daniel Schleith, a geographer from the University of Cincinnati, is bringing it back. Schleith calculated the “minimum commute” that would be required in the nation’s 25 largest urban areas if jobs and housing in those areas were “balanced,” and compared that with the actual average commutes in those areas. The difference between the two is the “excess commute.”
This method makes two related and equally fallacious assumptions: First, that the only purpose of transportation is to get to and from work, and second that the only factor that should be involved in choosing a home location is proximity to work. In fact, commuting makes up only less than 20 percent of our travel, and the other travel we do is only one of the many factors that might lead us to choose a home location that isn’t as close as possible to work.
Excess commuting first became an issue back in the 1980s when computers first became powerful enough to build crude models of an urban economy. The first models, which assumed that proximity to work was the only factor involved in home location, estimated that the average commute should be about one mile. In reality, it was seven miles.
Economists looked at these results and said, “There’s something wrong with our models. Maybe proximity to work isn’t the only factor in choosing home locations.”
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“In urban planning,” observed Yale political scientist James Scott in his book, Seeing Like a State, “it is a short step from parsimonious assumptions to the practice of shaping the environment so that it satisfies the simplifications required by the formula.” Unfortunately, too many cities have taken that short step and greatly interfered in peoples’ lives to try to shorten commutes.
There are several reasons why it is pointless to worry about excess commuting. First, most people compartmentalize their lives by keeping their homes and work separate. Surveys by Patricia Mohktarian of the University of California have found that people’s preferences are for average commutes of 15 to 20 minutes, which is only a little less than actual average commutes. Moreover, Mohktarian found, rather than view commuting as a chore, many found it entertaining.
Second, even if people wanted to live closer to work, they also want to live close to good schools, close to the kinds of shops they prefer to patronize, close to their spouse’s work, and close to other social and recreational opportunities. Proximity to work is only one, and probably not the most important, factor in choosing a home location.
As a result, even if jobs and housing were “balanced” (that is, the number of jobs equalled the number of workers in each community), people would continue to have “excess commutes” simply because most people wouldn’t live in the same communities as their jobs. Robert Cervero’s analysis of cities in the San Francisco Bay Area found that many “are nearly perfectly balanced, yet fewer than a third of their workers reside locally, and even smaller shares of residents work locally.”
Instead of worrying about where people live and how they travel, city planners, geographers, engineers, and economists should do their best to make what travel people want to do as safe and uncongested as possible. Sadly, that will require a revolution in the urban planning profession.
Yes, there are excessive commutes. For several years, I drove 25 urban miles to work. Those years were very, very stressful. On one trip home, which took two hours thanks to both I-5 and 99 being shut down due to accidents, I stopped at a light in South Lake Union where a homeless man knocked on my window. He said I looked so bummed out and stressed that he gave ME a dollar to buy a soda.
I now walk two blocks to work. Best decision ever. It means that my spouse and I are down to one car so we don’t have the expense of a second car and don’t have to worry about moving it every 72 hours to avoid getting ticketed for car ranching. It means I’m not completely stressed out when I get home. I also have an extra hour or two.
Tuesday, I drove back from hiking in the Cascades and came back into town during rush hour because I had a late meeting. I-90 from Bellevue to downtown was crawling. People weaving in and out of lanes. Stop. Go. Stop. Go. Stress about the girl behind me. Is she going to keep texting and rear end me?
I would MUCH rather walk to work than have to deal with the carmageddon that is Seattle traffic, thanks to which virtually every commute is excessive.
Here in Portland, my retort to this absurd idea has always been “People live where they can afford it and work where they can find any. Requiring the two to be a short distance from each other is not only ridiculous but discriminatory and will lead to deeply segregated neighborhoods and community tribalization”. Then add the fact that almost no one lives in a single income household anymore, it gets even more absurd.
“This method makes two related and equally fallacious assumptions: First, that the only purpose of transportation is to get to and from work, and second that the only factor that should be involved in choosing a home location is proximity to work.”
This would have been more useful in the post WWII era and up through the 70’s. Today the job market is much more fluid. People are not loyal to their employers and employers are not loyal to their employees. The company man is extinct. So unless you’re living in an RV, a job/housing land use mix probably isn’t going to make much of a difference in commute times.
For instance, I’ve lived in Austin for 10 years. In those 10 years I have had 5 different job’s (I’m including graduate student as a job for the purpose of the argument). I managed a restaurant near Lake Travis on the far west side of the MSA. I was a student at UT in the center of town. I tended bar at various establishments throughout the city. I was a land use planning consultant with an office in east Austin. My current position as a transit planner was originally officed in far north Austin. The office has since moved to south Austin. May of these locations are over 30 miles apart. There is no way I could have maintained a non-excessive commute without moving 6 times in 10 years. I do however prefer to live in areas with a mix of land uses (horizontally mostly). I like to be able to walk to places to go do things (I don’t walk for the sake of walking like suburbanites). Mr. O’Toole is correct. The location of my job has very little to do with where I choose to live.
The Antiplanner wrote:
This method makes two related and equally fallacious assumptions: First, that the only purpose of transportation is to get to and from work, and second that the only factor that should be involved in choosing a home location is proximity to work. In fact, commuting makes up only less than 20 percent of our travel, and the other travel we do is only one of the many factors that might lead us to choose a home location that isn’t as close as possible to work.
And it makes sense that people may want to choose the location of their home to avoid things like bad public schools, incompetent/inept/corrupt county and municipal governments and where a spouse may be working.
Excess commuting first became an issue back in the 1980s when computers first became powerful enough to build crude models of an urban economy. The first models, which assumed that proximity to work was the only factor involved in home location, estimated that the average commute should be about one mile. In reality, it was seven miles.
That might be true if only one person in a household was working, but because many households are two-earner homes because they have to be, at least in part because of high prices for housing, more than a few people will “drive until they qualify,” especially in states that Paul Krugman called “the zoned zone.”
We’ve known that jobs and housing balance does not cure excessive commuting ever since at least the 1960s, when the new towns in suburban Stockholm, Sweden, that were supposed to be self-contained, caused more commuting than ever as people would live in one and work in the other.
That being said, how many people have a long commute, would like to shorten it, but cannot due to unaffordable housing? If rampant NIMBY sentiment along the peninsular cities south of San Francisco (and in San Francisco itself) could be overcome, thereby creating more affordable housing through additional development, would people then live closer to work? The Antiplanner’s argument assumes that people don’t want to live close to work so they don’t, but what if they want to but cannot?
bennett, so you work as a transit planner. Please tell me you take transit to your far-flung office?
And moving six times in ten years is nothing for someone in grad school or just starting out their career. Certainly, if one is living in a sustainable space, one only has what one needs, and one can pack all one’s belongings into a Toyota Prius, which is only driven to the grocery store.
Once, again, commute trips are not wasteful.
Other posters have already touched on it, but the “excess commute” framework is not only unrealistic, but it is literally irrelevant for contemporary cities, whose households and firms are more dynamic than ever.
Of course excess commute time is the problem. And the answer is obviously to move the jobs out of the inner core of cities and subsidize them to relocate in burbs and exburbs. We need massive tax credits for businesses relocating to the burbs with lots of close housing, and even to the exburbs with future growth potential.
It has the added benefit of avoiding gentrification! Problems solved!
Transitboy wrote:
We’ve known that jobs and housing balance does not cure excessive commuting ever since at least the 1960s, when the new towns in suburban Stockholm, Sweden, that were supposed to be self-contained, caused more commuting than ever as people would live in one and work in the other.
Which new towns outside Stockholm are you referring to?
I was thinking of Vallingby in particular.
A good description of the new towns is in Sustainable new towns ?: Stockholm’s rail-served satellites by Robert Cervero in Cities, Volume 12, Issue 1, February 1996, 41 – 51. In summary, while the new towns did not reduce commuting the presence of the T-Bana meant that most commutes were by rail.
It will be interesting to see what long term effect the Washington Metro Silver Line will have on commutes to Tyson’s Corner, which in a way can function as a sort of American example of a situation somewhat similar to Vallingby.
transitboy wrote:
It will be interesting to see what long term effect the Washington Metro Silver Line will have on commutes to Tyson’s Corner, which in a way can function as a sort of American example of a situation somewhat similar to Vallingby.
Not at all similar.
Vällingby is not located on a major freeway (though this may get built in the reasonably near future to change that) and Tysons Corner is served directly by the Capital Beltway (I-495) and the Dulles Toll Road (Va. 267) and indirectly by I-66.
Vällingby was built from the start to be clustered around its heavy rail (Tunnelbana) station, unlike Tysons Corner, which grew up very well with relatively little bus transit, and until recently, no heavy rail at all.