Tag Archives: commuting

Linking longer commuting times to limited upward economic mobility

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A recent study suggests that longer commute times are related to fewer people moving up the economic ladder:

Novara cites “recent research from Harvard University highlighting that commuting time has emerged as the strongest factor in determining whether a person escapes the cycles of poverty.”…

“These results are consistent with the view that the negative impacts of segregation may operate by making it more difficult to reach jobs or other resources that facilitate upward mobility. But any such spatial mismatch explanation must explain why the gradients emerge before children enter the labor market, as shown in Section V.E. A lack of access to nearby jobs cannot directly explain why children from low-income families are also more likely to have teenage births and less likely to attend college in cities with low levels of upward mobility. However, spatial mismatch could produce such patterns if it changes children’s behavior because they have fewer successful role models or reduces their perceived returns to education.”…

By Chetty’s numbers, commute time is up there with the fraction of single parents in terms of correlation. Family structure, is, of course, an age-old social concern; commuting time, not so much. All Chetty and his co-authors do is correlate, though they take a little stab at causation…

It’s not that commuting time is a magic bullet; no one factor Chetty studied is. But among the factors he did study—family structure, race and income segregation, school quality, social capital—it doesn’t get a lot of attention for its effects on social outcomes. And (as Yonah Freemark details) it’s something local governments can play a direct role in addressing.

“Spatial mismatch” is the idea that workers don’t live near the jobs they are likely to get. This happens often in metropolitan areas; cheaper housing is not necessarily near the jobs that those residents have or want to get. And I’m not sure cities and regions can do much about this; residential segregation tends to mean that higher-income and lower-income residents don’t often live near each other. The sort of white-collar jobs that could help people escape poverty may be located in suburban office parks, places that are not easily served by mass transit even if officials were willing to pour the money needed to get them up and running. If affordable housing and where businesses locate are simply left up to the market, they may have little incentive to locate near their workers.

Early 1990s proposal for Personal Rapid Transit in the Chicago suburbs

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Officials are still trying to develop effective mass transit in the Chicago suburbs but perhaps they missed something: an early 1990s proposal for Personal Rapid Transport from several suburbs.

I came across a 1991 “Proposal for a Personal Rapid Transit Demonstration System” from the Village of Rosemont. Envision, if you will, a network of autonomous, futuristic five-person pods zipping through the glassy canyon of corporate headquarters near O’Hare, alighting at their passengers’ chosen destination…

It wasn’t the only avant-garde transportation idea that the RTA was considering at the time “in an effort to coax drivers, particularly in the suburbs, out of their cars.” In June of 1992, as the competition to get PRT continued, the agency was also investigating SERCs, or “stackable electric rental cars,” approximately the size of a Honda Accord, with a range of 28 miles and a top speed of 50-60 miles an hour. The system would allow workers to take the Metra to a SERC station, drive the last few miles to the office or home, and return it by the next day—sort of like bike-share for tiny electric cars. It doesn’t seem to have gone beyond a symposium on the technology.

But the PRT plan got serious. Rosemont retained Winston & Strawn—around the same time the RTA hired them for lobbying work—at a cost of $50,000. They spent another $50,000 to prepare for the application. The mayor told the Tribune in May of 1991 that they were prepared to spend another $100,000 to get the RTA experiment. And Rosemont got the nod, though it took two years.

In 1998, eight years after and $22.5 million dollars after the RTA set it in motion, Rosemont’s PRT system came to life. It came to life on a test track at Raytheon in Massachusetts, but nonetheless, it existed, in RTA-emblazoned glory. RTA officials were pleased.

Moser suggests the plan was killed by two main factors: cost overruns and then Raytheon got out of this particular business. But, I just don’t see how this would have been attractive to average suburbanites. Monorail like lines would have to be constructed to connect major buildings and nodes; how many want to live around those (even with little noise)? It still requires a certain level of density in order to have consistent ridership. This might work great along office corridors – which the suburbs in on this proposal, Rosemont, Naperville, Deerfield, and Schaumburg, all have – where there are thousands of workers on a regular basis. The primary advantage is that people don’t have to ride with many others, something that wealthier commuters seem to like and would pay to get. But, in the end, this seems like a more private form of train/monorail/bus linking higher density areas.

The county with the worst roads for traveling in the Chicago region

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The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning has a new data tool online and it provides insights into the commuting experiences of Chicago area residents:

CMAP planners say it’s time to “get people excited about data.” The hope is CMAP’s constituents — Cook, DuPage, Kane, Kendall, Lake, McHenry, and Will counties — will use the facts to understand why certain projects deserve prioritization and funding. To access the data, go to http://www.cmap.illinois.gov/mobility/explore…

To that end, a section on ride quality includes detailed maps measuring pavement conditions on both expressways and major roads. A snapshot of counties’ ride quality on major roads puts Cook County with a 47 percent rating compared to 72 percent in DuPage, 80 percent in Kane and 83 percent in Lake and 90 percent in McHenry.

Other data available includes stats on bridges in need of repair, pavement quality, the number of passengers boarding at Metra and CTA stops and the worst railway crossings for delays in the region — FYI, it’s on Chicago’s South Side at Morgan Street and Pershing Road with 3,194 vehicles delayed a day.

Taken cumulatively, the website sends a message that the region’s infrastructure needs more capital to avoid gridlock, stagnant transit and deteriorating roads. The warning is timely, with a new governor in Springfield and a push for state and federal multiyear capital programs.

Two things strike me as interesting:

1. I always like the idea of putting more data into people’s hands. Commuting is a common experience and one that people would probably want to see improved. However, without data that moves behind individual and/or anecdotal evidence, it is hard to have conversations about the bigger picture in the region.

2. Some people may like data but it is another thing to translate that data access into collective action. Assuming that some people go to this site, will they then take an interest in infrastructure projects? Will they contact political officials? Will they vote differently? How exactly CMAP goes about putting this data into action is worth paying attention to.

The revival of big city downtowns not about recreating economic hubs?

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Joel Kotkin suggests revived downtowns of big American cities aren’t exactly bringing back the old days where they served as economic hubs:

Instead what’s emerging is a very different conceptualization of downtown, as a residential alternative that appeals to the young and childless couples, and that is not so much a dominant economic hub, but one of numerous poles in the metropolitan archipelago, usually with an outsized presence of financial institutions, government offices and business service firms…

The better numbers reflect then not a mass “back to the city” movement but an uptick in the market appeal of city centers. And it’s unlikely that the old urban cores will ever come close to recovering the economic preeminence they once enjoyed. In American Community Survey data from 2006-08, the central business district of the New York metro area was the only one across the country that accounted for over 20% of regional employment; downtown’s share topped 10% in just six other metro areas: Chicago, Boston, Washington D.C., Richmond, Chicago and Hartford. This contrasts with the kind of employment dominance seen in the 1950s when Manhattan’s commercial core accounted for more than 35% of employment in the New York area. Of course, the decline is a natural outgrowth of the massive physical expansion of the New York area during the past half century, a pattern seen in other major regions.

From 2000 to 2010, the share of jobs dropped somewhat in the nation’s biggest urban cores, but employment declined far more in the inner ring suburbs, according to an analysis by demographer Wendell Cox. In contrast the fastest job growth was in suburban and exurban areas, paralleling their gains in population. This has become clearer since the recession ended; the consultancy Costar notes between 2012 and 2013 office absorption grew quicker in the suburbs than the core, accounting for 87% of new office demand. Overall suburbs account for nearly 75% of all office space in our metropolitan areas…

This resurgence in L.A., and elsewhere, is no mean accomplishment, but it also does not constitute sea-change in fundamental economic geography. Downtowns are back, but more as a lifestyle option than as a dominant feature of the metropolitan landscape.

Could big city downtowns be more urban lifestyle centers? Compared to suburbs, these downtowns offer more cultural options: museums, large urban parks, restaurants, theaters, non big box shopping. Suburbs have more cultural options than they did in the past – and the stereotypes that all suburbs were bedroom suburbs with no other activities was never true – but cities offer a higher concentration. And could city condos be a clear status symbol of today’s upper-middle or upper class?

Another piece of data that might help here are reverse commuting patterns. Looking at these downtown census tracts and blocks, how many residents work nearby or in the city compared to past decades?

Self-driving cars could make sprawl even more popular

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Suburban sprawl has its critics but self-driving cars may just make long commutes more palatable:

As driving becomes less onerous and computer-controlled systems reduce traffic, some experts worry that will eliminate a powerful incentive—commuting sucks—for living near cities, where urban density makes for more efficient sharing of resources. In other words, autonomous vehicles could lead to urban sprawl.

It’s simple, says Ken Laberteaux, a senior scientist at Toyota. If you make transportation faster, easier and perhaps cheaper, then people won’t mind commuting. “What a consumer is expected to do is see what they can gain by moving a little further from the job centers or the cultural centers,” he says. That’s bad news: Urban sprawl is linked to economic, environmental, and health hardships…

Laberteaux’s not the only one concerned about this. Autonomous vehicles should ease highway congestion, and commuters will be able to catch up on work or sleep en route to the office. That limits the incentive to trade your McMansion for a brownstone, says Reid Ewing, director of the University of Utah’s Metropolitan Research Center. The implications of this go beyond transportation; in a 2014 report for advocacy group Smart Growth America, Ewing linked sprawl to obesity and economic immobility.

Ewing likens autonomous driving to the construction of “superhighways” during the post-war boom years, which spurred suburbanization. “If you can travel at higher speeds with less congestion and you can use your time productively while you’re traveling in a self-driving car, the generalized cost of travel will be less on a vehicle-per-mile basis,” says Ewing. “Just like when, before the interstate system, people were traveling at 30 miles per hour, there wasn’t nearly the spread of development that there is today.”

The car is a remarkable invention that with adaptation (oil doesn’t seem to be quite running out, alternative fuel sources, etc.) could be around for a long time. So, perhaps the real answer to limiting sprawl is simply getting rid of cars or finding more and more ways to incentive not owning a car.

Changing worker’s commutes from driving to mass transit can be hard

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A new study looks at how the World Wildlife Fund successfully pushed workers to switch to mass transit when they moved their offices:

Last fall, the World Wildlife Fund moved its U.K. headquarters from Godalming to Woking. One of the main reasons given for the move was the desire for a more sustainable work environment. To that end, the company encouraged employees to trade their car commute for the train; Woking had much better rail connection anyway, and for six months after the move WWF-UK paid the fare difference for workers whose rail costs rose or who switched from driving…

In a word, the decline in car commuting, and related rise in train use, was remarkable. The share of employees driving to work fell from 55 percent, when the office had been in Godalming, to roughly 23 percent a week after the move to Woking (and 29 percent a month later). The share using the train, meanwhile, did just the reverse: rising from 18.5 percent before to 56 percent after the move. The use of other modes, including cycling, walking, car-share, and bus, remained pretty steady, all under 10 percent…

In simple terms, that finding merely echoes what we all know: old habits die hard. But in terms of encouraging new commute behavior, it’s a critical insight, because it establishes a timeline for intervention. If a commuter mode-shift program isn’t sustained for long enough, there’s a real possibility of relapse, since the old habits tend to linger even after the new one starts to form, and since the new one doesn’t reach the power of the old even after a month…

Some might consider WWF-UK a best-case commute-shift scenario. These are environmentally conscious workers, after all, and the new transit option was much more appealing (the train station at Woking was a 7-minute walk from the office, compared with 25 minutes at Godalming). Then again, driving wasn’t exactly a huge hassle here: the new office sits right on top of a parking lot, and WWF-UK subsidized employee parking for six months after the move.

An interesting question to consider. It sounds like the study primarily puts this in terms of the habits and patterns of the employees but making the switch to mass transit may not be so simple. For example, employees might initially choose where to live based on the mode of their commuting. If the company suddenly moves, that doesn’t necessarily mean everyone can now take the train.

How much does it matter that this relocation primarily took place in a suburban context? It is one thing if a company moved from Westerminister to the City in London proper. Here, the move was more on the periphery of the metropolitan area as Woking is 23 miles out. Certain companies might attract more urban employees, perhaps younger couples or those interested in certain political or social causes, making a move to an area with more mass transit more attractive.

In the end, how much does this one case tell us about larger commuting habits that are hard to break?

Could a 220 mile round trip commute become more common?

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Supercommuters are rare but here is one man’s story of driving 220 miles a day to a “dream job at the Department of Justice.” Of course, he says it is all for his family.

My first thought: this has to have long-term consequences for this man and his family. Those miles and hours will add up.

My second thought: I wonder if these sorts of stories will pick up with the rise of driverless cars. Right now, the problems of a long time spent in the car include lost time and stress. But, imagine you get in the car in your driveway, point to the destination, you don’t have to touch anything, and you get to relax and do what you want in the cabin until you arrive. Perhaps the driverless car will even lead to an uptick in driving, reversing a trend that threatens gas tax revenues. For those who like driverless cars for their gains in safety, would they also be willing to accept more driving?

“The ideal commute is not actually no commute” relies on the separation of home and work

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Eric Jaffe looks at some evidence that suggests Americans want a bit of a commute to detox from work:

To want a longer trip to or from work may seem strange, if not pathologically self-loathing, when considering all that’s known about the stresses and health hazards of commuting. Still, I’m not entirely alone here. You might think the ideal commute is no commute, but when you actually ask commuters, that isn’t always what they say. In a memorable Washington Post piece from years back, tracking the affection some commuters have for their home-to-office-and-back trip, one man “cursed with a three-minute drive to his job” wished he had some “time to detox”…

A classic study from 2001, conducted by Lothlorien Redmond and Patricia Mokhtarian, asked roughly 1,300 workers in the San Francisco area to report both their “actual” and their “ideal” commute times. The researchers found that the average one-way ideal was actually 16 minutes. Nearly a third of the respondents reported an ideal one-way time of 20 minutes or more. Less than 2 percent reported an ideal under 4 minutes, and only 1.2 percent reported an ideal commute of zero commute...

Now, that’s the exception, not the rule. Redmond and Mokhtarian did find that most respondents, nearly 52 percent, preferred a commute at least 5 minutes shorter than their actual one (which, on average for these folks, was 40 minutes). But 87 people in the sample, or nearly 7 percent, had an ideal commute that was at least 5 minutes longer than their actual commute (which, in this case, was 10 minutes, on average). For the 42 percent of participants whose actual and ideal trips were more or less the same, the average commute was 15 minutes, one way. It seems a quarter hour is something like a preferred commuter constant…

More recent attempts to understand commuter desires have uncovered plenty of nuance. Mode obviously matters. Some work suggests that drivers find their commute more stressful than others, on account of traffic, unexpected delays, and the existence of other drivers. Transit riders can feel some stress, too, especially when the train or bus is delayed, and they also have to worry more about boredom (though that’s quickly becoming obsolete). Walkers and cyclists report the most relaxing and exciting trips.

The type of day you’ve had matters, too. One study, published late last year, recorded trip diaries of 76 commuters over a five-day period. When the demands of the work day were low, the detachment commuters felt during the trip home didn’t influence their anxiety levels once they got there (accounting for travel time). But on days with lots of stress at work, the opposite was true: more detachment on the commute meant less anxiety—and more serenity—upon getting home.

All of this makes some sense within the current system where many people work in a more corporate setting (don’t underestimate the connections between large social changes and the rise of the modern white-collar office) and live within more sprawling metropolitan regions.

Yet, this is based on a social system where work and home are typically separated. This hasn’t always been the case throughout human history. Centuries ago, many people lived and worked within the same building or property. In other words, this idea that you go somewhere to work didn’t really exist. In Crabgrass Frontier, historian Kenneth Jackson describes how even as late as 1815 49 out of 50 workers lived within a one mile walk of their place of employment. Home and work continued to get pulled apart during the Industrial Revolution as well as the urbanization that affected developing countries.

Talk of having no commute for most workers has existed for several decades due to the possibilities for telecommuting. (Granted, this option is more restricted for certain kinds of jobs, particularly in service and manual labor sectors.) Still, many businesses and workers continue to want to go to an office and so we’ll continue to participate in and analyze commutes.

Chicago area transit problem: “Only 12 percent of suburbanites can get to work in less than 90 minutes via mass transit”

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As Chicago area leaders debate how local groups should approach regional mass transit, a Chicago Tribune editorial in favor of shaking things up says changes would make mass transit more accessible:

The group’s 95-page report suggests measures to curb the sort of political meddling that led to the resignations of six Metra board members. It also makes a case that a streamlined organizational chart would reduce corruption simply by limiting the number of actors…

Our region’s three transit agencies waste tax dollars on lobbyists to compete with one another for more tax dollars for parochial priorities, instead of developing a consensus vision that would lead to more investment. From 2002 to 2012, consolidated transit systems serving Boston, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., have spent almost twice as much per resident on transit as Chicago has, the task force says.

Lack of coordination between the CTA, Metra and Pace means that riders whose commutes involve switching from bus to train or vice versa are stuck with long waits, poor connections and multiple fare systems. The task force says only 12 percent of suburbanites can get to work in less than 90 minutes via mass transit.

That last figure is important: mass transit is really a limited option in the Chicago suburbs. While there are still transit issues in Chicago itself (expanding L lines, building more bicycles paths and lanes), the issues in the broader region often get overlooked. Suburban job centers are not connected. The railroad lines run into the city, meaning commuters can’t make connections to other lines often until they are in Chicago’s Loop. If the region was still centered on lots of jobs in the Loop, this all might make sense. But, it hasn’t been this way for decades and the suburban mass transit options have not kept pace.

Argument: Christie case drawing so much attention because commuting affects so many people

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Here is an interesting take on Chris Christie’s predicament: it is getting so much attention because commuting matters to a lot of people.

New York City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer just published this chart of the breakdown of constituent service requests and complaints his office fielded during 2013 (“no problem is too small for us to handle,” Van Bramer writes in his annual report card):

How we get around has an enormous influence on our quality of life, and so it’s central to what we expect from our elected officials. This is why unplowed roads can undermine an entire administration. It’s why arcane changes to residential parking permit policy stir such public ire. It’s why problems with transportation make up the largest single set of concerns that a local city councilman must address – beyond even jobs, public safety, and housing.

This is also why New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is in such trouble. Were he neck-deep in a petty political spat involving a public park or a job-training program or a real-estate project, the scandal wouldn’t resonate quite so widely. We often talk about transportation – and its sub-genres of parking policy, street design, traffic management and mass transit planning – as a niche interest of nerds at the national level. Locally, though, no issue is more politically potent.

Don’t mess with the commute of the average American. It might be much worse because driving is involved because driving usually implies more independence and privacy. On the other hand, when mass transit is at fault, like it has been this past week with Metra in the Chicago area, there is less that the individual commuter can do. Uncontrollable situations are bad enough but intentional sabotage of commuting would infuriate all commuters.