We should not be commuting 45 minutes. In the future, you telecommute or live in communities designed to minimize commutes. Traveling long distance should basically be an edge-case and might involve something totally different from short-distance transport like an evacuated tube train e.g. "HyperLoop".
45 minutes is probably a 5-30 mile commute. Do you really think we need to travel at 600 mph to solve that problem?
If you read the article, they are only talking about 4 miles, as mentioned in the first paragraph:
"On a brisk October day in Chicago, a few employees from the design firm Ideo left their office and headed to Knife & Tine, a restaurant about four miles away. The goal, besides lunch, was to complete the journey within 45 minutes, on a budget of just $10 for the whole group, all while carrying bulky shopping bags."
5-10 miles no, 30 miles it might be workable to use a high-speed transport. I assumed long distance since they said 45 minutes. A 45 minute commute, walking or otherwise, indicates a poor design. Sustainable doesn't need to mean giving up convenience or technology.
30-45 minute commute is pretty normal even within cities with good subway/transit systems. Walk to transit. Wait for transit. Possibly switch to another line. Walk to destination. This can easily amount to that timeframe even over just few mile distance.
Yes, I am quite familiar with typical cities and commute times as I used to live in New York.
However, there are some fundamental design changes that we can and should make that will dramatically improve the situation versus a typical city of today.
Please see my http://tinyvillages.org which has most of it. But I will mention a few things.
One, most office work can and should be done over the internet with increased used of voice, video and other collaboration.
Secondly, most metropolitan areas are actually largely suburban. My design improves land use and density by about 800% over current suburbs, which means much shorter distance between business and home and therefore much shorter commutes.
Thirdly, automated single passenger (self-driving) vehicles can dramatically reduce commute times by reducing waits to near zero and massively improving traffic efficiency.
Fourth, a sane urban design will have a law and information system that distributes operating/commute times evenly along morning and evening windows to effectively mitigate rush hours.
Even in high density cities with great public transit like Paris, Tokyo, London and Moscow have long commutes. I'd be interested in seeing data from these commuter friendly cities showing average "work related" commute times. It's not like when you get a new job you can just rent a new place close to work. In vast metro areas, commute times are going to vary from very short to very long.
It is very difficult to minimize commutes because of all of the things you are simultaneously minimizing and maximizing. In two income families, you have two different job locations, with kids you have school considerations (as well as distance to grandma's), you have housing considerations (size of house, lot, urban, suburban, ex-urban) and more. But just the issue with minimizing two commutes is difficult.
I hate commuting, but I love riding my bike to work. But because I need to drop off or pick up the kids, it means I have to drive on some days.
My wife and I choose our house for a number of factors and due to the fact that DC has some of the worst traffic in the country is commute is about 50 minutes to and hour each way.
The commute of the future is drastically less commuting in general. Either because more people will telecommute, or because more people will live closer to work (urban revitalization), or perhaps because fewer people will need to work at all (basic income).
I'm also somewhat worried about what the decline of individual car ownership will mean for the ever increasing power of surveillance that governments and corporations have on our lives. Rideshare apps will probably track every single ride whether you like it or not, a hundred times more accurately and comprehensively than cameras on streets. More and more public transportation networks are also transitioning to electronic payment systems that can record all of your trips and mine that data; gone are the days of anonymous paper tickets. And I wouldn't be surprised if bicycle renting services of the future equipped all their bikes with always-on trackers.
Sure, we already carry iTrackers all over the place with us, but this is a whole new level of virtually unavoidable surveillance. My parents' old car might have been expensive to maintain and massively harmful to the environment, but at least it was too dumb to report your every movement to Big Brother (especially on cameraless rural roads).
I'm a tree hugging city-dweller. The article's beginning of bashing my regular transit really turned me off.
I don't think $10 is representative. A 30-day CTA pass is $100 and a 1-year Divvy pass is $99. For people that use these transit options regularly, this trip sound like it would have been easy. The train was really so hot and rank on a brisk October day?
I agree that subways, bikes, and buses are not ideal. They are what we have in mass quantities right now. I do want better transit in the future. Tell me the story about that grand future. I don't want to bash the present non-car transit, when there are no alternatives yet.
Once I pushed through, I did appreciate the categorization of 3 commuters: Time Trumpers, Everyday Improvers, and Experience Seekers.
The article's public transit bashing felt like the beginning of an informercial: an inept, clueless, and frustrated person failing at some common task a six year old can do.
Plenty of pubic transit systems are clean, punctual, and well mapped to the point that plenty of citydwellers don't own cars. I've even toured DC and Boston without a car, first time visitor both times.
This failed as submarine PR; it made me think badly of both Ford and IDEO, for being behind the times.
Google Maps already does all of this. A wordy NYT article describing a meandering and expensive process to build a very obvious piece of software isn't a realistic portrayal of the capabilities of the developers, but makes me feel like they're idiots, out of touch, and incapable/incompetent.
If you're going to do submarine PR, at least make it make you look good.
Commuting isn't an evil. Commuting is part of separating work and life. It's about living where you want regardless of where your job requires you to be. Once upon a time working people stayed with a single employer for many years. Chances were that their home moved many times. Commuting allowed that to happen. Today, the situation is flipped. We bounce between jobs but our home remains. Commuting now allows that too.
If you want to live close to work then fine, that's your choice. But some people want different things. An hour-long commute each day is for many an acceptable price to live where and how they like. From a sustainability and productive angle it would probably be best if we all slept in the room above the shop. That was the 18th century and we got rid of it for good reason. So give Ford credit for seeking to improve the commute when so many today seem bent on its eliminating.
> But some people want different things. An hour-long commute each day is for many an acceptable price to live where and how they like.
I think most people being vocal against commuting and working in offices will agree that's it's up to you, but at the moment the issue is society is very much optimised for people who like commuting. Poor public transport, remote office parks with nothing around, offices in the city centre where even tiny apartments are unaffordable, etc.
If you like commuting then that's great, but the idea of commuting an hour+ each day is my idea of hell :D
Exactly, the vast majority of people who work in cities use computers to do their job. The whole idea of offices is a holdover from the last generation. You don't need to have people come to the same physical space to work together nowadays.
The other argument that gets thrown around is that managers want to make sure people are working. First, this is hugely insulting, as it implies that the company doesn't trust people to be capable of managing their time. Second, it's completely ineffective as people are perfectly capable of finding ways to waste time at the office. There are far better ways of doing performance metrics than making people sit in the same room together.
Regarding making sure people are working: In my sh.tty open office layout it's pretty much guaranteed that nothing of any complexity will get done. The only thing that can be measured is pure attendance.
28 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 99.4 ms ] threadhttp://tinyvillages.org
If you read the article, they are only talking about 4 miles, as mentioned in the first paragraph:
"On a brisk October day in Chicago, a few employees from the design firm Ideo left their office and headed to Knife & Tine, a restaurant about four miles away. The goal, besides lunch, was to complete the journey within 45 minutes, on a budget of just $10 for the whole group, all while carrying bulky shopping bags."
However, there are some fundamental design changes that we can and should make that will dramatically improve the situation versus a typical city of today.
Please see my http://tinyvillages.org which has most of it. But I will mention a few things.
One, most office work can and should be done over the internet with increased used of voice, video and other collaboration.
Secondly, most metropolitan areas are actually largely suburban. My design improves land use and density by about 800% over current suburbs, which means much shorter distance between business and home and therefore much shorter commutes.
Thirdly, automated single passenger (self-driving) vehicles can dramatically reduce commute times by reducing waits to near zero and massively improving traffic efficiency.
Fourth, a sane urban design will have a law and information system that distributes operating/commute times evenly along morning and evening windows to effectively mitigate rush hours.
I hate commuting, but I love riding my bike to work. But because I need to drop off or pick up the kids, it means I have to drive on some days.
My wife and I choose our house for a number of factors and due to the fact that DC has some of the worst traffic in the country is commute is about 50 minutes to and hour each way.
A failure of thought process on every level; ideas this facially bad should be recognized immediately.
I'm also somewhat worried about what the decline of individual car ownership will mean for the ever increasing power of surveillance that governments and corporations have on our lives. Rideshare apps will probably track every single ride whether you like it or not, a hundred times more accurately and comprehensively than cameras on streets. More and more public transportation networks are also transitioning to electronic payment systems that can record all of your trips and mine that data; gone are the days of anonymous paper tickets. And I wouldn't be surprised if bicycle renting services of the future equipped all their bikes with always-on trackers.
Sure, we already carry iTrackers all over the place with us, but this is a whole new level of virtually unavoidable surveillance. My parents' old car might have been expensive to maintain and massively harmful to the environment, but at least it was too dumb to report your every movement to Big Brother (especially on cameraless rural roads).
Only if cities relax height restrictions on residential construction.
I don't think $10 is representative. A 30-day CTA pass is $100 and a 1-year Divvy pass is $99. For people that use these transit options regularly, this trip sound like it would have been easy. The train was really so hot and rank on a brisk October day?
I agree that subways, bikes, and buses are not ideal. They are what we have in mass quantities right now. I do want better transit in the future. Tell me the story about that grand future. I don't want to bash the present non-car transit, when there are no alternatives yet.
Once I pushed through, I did appreciate the categorization of 3 commuters: Time Trumpers, Everyday Improvers, and Experience Seekers.
Plenty of pubic transit systems are clean, punctual, and well mapped to the point that plenty of citydwellers don't own cars. I've even toured DC and Boston without a car, first time visitor both times.
Google Maps already does all of this. A wordy NYT article describing a meandering and expensive process to build a very obvious piece of software isn't a realistic portrayal of the capabilities of the developers, but makes me feel like they're idiots, out of touch, and incapable/incompetent.
If you're going to do submarine PR, at least make it make you look good.
An outmoded company that loses money on all its cars save the F-150? Rather than being bailed out, it should have been left to rot on the vine.
If you want to live close to work then fine, that's your choice. But some people want different things. An hour-long commute each day is for many an acceptable price to live where and how they like. From a sustainability and productive angle it would probably be best if we all slept in the room above the shop. That was the 18th century and we got rid of it for good reason. So give Ford credit for seeking to improve the commute when so many today seem bent on its eliminating.
I think most people being vocal against commuting and working in offices will agree that's it's up to you, but at the moment the issue is society is very much optimised for people who like commuting. Poor public transport, remote office parks with nothing around, offices in the city centre where even tiny apartments are unaffordable, etc.
If you like commuting then that's great, but the idea of commuting an hour+ each day is my idea of hell :D
The other argument that gets thrown around is that managers want to make sure people are working. First, this is hugely insulting, as it implies that the company doesn't trust people to be capable of managing their time. Second, it's completely ineffective as people are perfectly capable of finding ways to waste time at the office. There are far better ways of doing performance metrics than making people sit in the same room together.